In this paper we focus on the recent restructuring of the Italian pension system and in particular on the reforms concerning the tax-favored retirement saving accounts. These reforms issued in the early and mid- 1990s reduced the riskiness of private retirement saving plans and their overall...

Using Italian household data we jointly estimate the yearly cost of participating to the stock market and the cross sectional distribution of optimism about excess returns of stocks over bonds. Using mean-variance analysis we derive individual efficient portfolio allocation rules, as functions...

We use household data to estimate the cost of participating to financial markets and the cross sectional dispersion of stock market optimism. Our analysis is based on a mean-variance framework, within which we derive structural decision rules for individual composition of the risky assets...

We document the development of the major international banks since the late 1990s, analysing balance-sheet data for 27 large and complex financial institutions. We argue that balance-sheet expansion and business line diversification paved the way for the rise of the universal banking model. This...