The authors analyze the welfare implications of liquidity constraints for households in an overlapping generations model with growth. In a closed economy with exogenous technical progress, liquidity constraints reduce welfare if the economy is dynamically inefficient. But, if it is dynamically...

We analyze the welfare implications of liquidity constraints for households in an overlapping generations model with growth. In a closed economy with exogenous technical progress, liquidity constraints reduce welfare if the economy is dynamically inefficient. But if it is dynamically efficient,...

The association between health outcomes and education – the health-education gradient - is widely documented but little is known about its source. Using microeconomic data on a sample of individuals aged 50+ in eight European countries, we find that education and cognitive skills (such as...

The single most important policy-induced innovation in the international financial system since the collapse of the Bretton-Woods regime is the institution of the European Monetary Union. This paper provides an account of how the process of financial integration has promoted financial...

We present a new empirical strategy for testing if financial integration improves risk sharing opportunities and consumption smoothing. Our test is based on a decomposition of the variance of consumption growth into a component that depends on the variance of permanent income shocks and one that...

How far can shoe-leather go in explaining the welfare cost of inflation? Using a unique set of microeconomic data on households, we estimate the parameters of the demand for money derived from a generalized Baumol-Tobin model. Our data set contains information on average holdings of cash, on...

Theory predicts that information sharing among lenders attenuates adverse selection and moral hazard, and can therefore increase lending and reduce default rates. To test these predictions, we construct a new international data set on private credit bureaus and public credit registers. We find...

We provide evidence that the quality of health care affects health outcomes, exploiting the substantial variability in the quality of the Italian public health service. The data are drawn from the 2001 Survey of Health, Aging and Wealth (SHAW), a joint venture of the Universities of Padua,...

We test the validity of three models of intertemporal consumption choice (the permanent income hypothesis, the myopic model, and the consumption insurance model) by means of mobility indexes for the underlying consumption distribution. Each of the three models delivers different transition laws...

Data revisions and the availability of a longer sample offer the opportunity to reconsider the empirical findings that suggest that in the OECD countries national saving responds non-monotonically to fiscal policy. The paper confirms that the circumstance most likely to give rise to a...