A growing body of literature shows that nancial literacy aects household savings and investment choices. Less attention has, however, been devoted to its eect on debt behaviour. This paper contributes to lling this gap by considering how nancial literacy in uences household attitudes with...

By requiring individuals to decide whether to participate in (newly established) pension funds, how much to contribute and how to invest their retirement wealth, pension reforms have raised concerns about the ability of households to deal with financial decisions. Using the Bank of Italy's...

In this paper we study the effects of the reform of the system of severance indemnities (TFR) currently in use for Italian employees on the cost and the access to credit for Italian small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). The most direct consequence of the reform will be to reduce the amount...

The decline in saving rates experienced by some European countries has raised concerns about the importance of a country’s wealth accumulation, in particular in light of a more fair but less generous pension system. This paper carries out a macroeconomic analysis of the impact of pension...

The low level of financial literacy in many countries suggests that households are at risk of sub-optimal financial decisions. In this paper we assess to what extent financial advisors can substitute for such a lack of knowledge, by analyzing the effect of investors’ financial literacy on...

The concept of “familiarity” has been used in financial economics to explain apparent paradoxes in people’s behavior, such as the home bias in portfolio choices. In this study, we investigate whether (lack of) familiarity with the language of investor communication may contribute to an...

Financial literacy has important implications for economic reforms. Reforms are meant to change people’s behavior and their effectiveness crucially depends on the ability of citizens to recognize and generally approve their necessity, their general design, and their “sense of direction.”...

We use a Cox-type model to investigate the role of the family as an informal market: parents enjoy their children’s proximity (a proxy for the informal care they can receive from their kids) and “reward” them with an anticipated wealth transfer. Children appreciate the reward, particularly...

This paper aims at detecting whether Italian households exhibit excess sensitivity in their consumption with regard to “severance pay”, a sizable, expected lump sum that workers receive at either retirement or whenever they leave their job for whatever reason. One of the implications of the...