In this paper we focus on poor financial literacy as one potential factor explaining lack of portfolio diversification. We use the 2007 Unicredit Customers' Survey, which has indicators of portfolio choice, financial literacy and many demographic characteristics of investors. We first propose...

Although a large number of studies have been done on intergenerational transfers of goods, little is known about intergenerational transfers of time. In step with an increase in the aging of the population, the demand for time-intensive transfers in health care and other health services...

The divergence of unemployment rates between the U.S. and Europe coincided with a substantial acceleration in capital-embodied technical change in the late 70’s. Furthermore, evidence suggests that European economies have been lagging behind the U.S. in the adoption and usage of new...

A substantial body of empirical works document that exchange rate pass-through to consumer prices is incomplete. This evidence has cast doubts on the ability of flexible exchange rates to generate expenditure switching. In a dynamic stochastic discrete-time duopoly game, non-price competition...

The Cox statistic for non nested models is used to test the probit and logit specifications estimated by Bardasi and Monfardini (1997) for the occupational choice of the Italian workers among the private, the public and the self-employed options. Computation of different versions of test is...

This paper proposes an expected utility framework for the treatment of theoretical and empirical issues in technical analysis. Circumstances are found in which a technical analysts' behaviour is 'rationalisable' and schemes for learning such rational behaviour are considered. The decision...

A continuous monitoring of the evolution of the economy is fundamental for the decisions of public and private decision makers. This paper proposes a new monthly indicator of the euro area real Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with several original features. First, it considers both the output side...

There is a wide literature on the dynamic adjustment of employment and its relationship with the business cycle. Our aim is to propose a statistical model that offers a congruent representation of post-war US employment and output data. We use a cointegrated vector autoregressive...

This paper studies the role of exit from a monetary union during a debt crisis. A monetary union, such as the European Monetary Union, needs to establish a procedure for exit as a tool to cope with debt default. The paper studies various forms of exit and argues that “Euroization” is both a...