This paper deals with the estimation of the Euler Equation when durable consumption is taken into account. If durables are not separable in utility from non-durables, estimating the Euler Equation without conditioning on them leads to incorrect inference. I use microdata on non-durable and...

This paper provides basic statistics on household total wealth, financial assets, and financial assets composition of the elderly as key indicators of the well-being and quality of life of the elderly. Median total wealth varies much less than median financial wealth across countries. As for...

This paper proposes an approximation to the consumption function in the buffer-stock model. The approximation is based on the analytic properties of the consumption function in the buffer-stock model. In such model, the consumption function is increasing and concave and its derivative is bounded...

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...

This paper investigates the association between discounting and risk of expropriation and provides the theoretical conditions that make a positive association consistent with rationality. Moreover, using a national representative sample and a representative sample of the 50+ in eleven European...

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,...

How does the punishment for default affect repayment behavior? We use administrative data provided by the leading Italian lender of unsecured credit to the household sector to investigate the effect of two potentially important factors: judicial efficiency and the availability of informal credit...

We study the relation between cognitive ability and the decision to invest in stocks using the recent Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). The survey has detailed data on wealth and portfolio composition of individuals aged 50+ in 11 European countries and three indicators...

The diversity in the current degree of financial development across the EU can be a great opportunity at a time where this area is poised to become increasingly financially integrated. Integration should accelerate the development of the most backward financial markets, and allow companies from...

We review savings trends in Italy, summarizing available empirical evidence on Italians’ motives to save, relying on macroeconomic indicators as well as on data drawn from the Bank of Italy’s Survey of Household Income and Wealth from 1984 to 2004. The macroeconomic data indicate that...