We provide a theoretical and empirical study of the relation between financial development and the size of the underground economy. In our theoretical framework agents allocate investment between a low-return technology which can be operated with internal funds, and a high-return technology...

The paper summarizes the main implications of the life cycle hypothesis regarding the individual and aggregate saving, fiscal policy and social security, focusing on the most important contributions of Modigliani on these issues. Although it is not easy to reconcile some recent empirical results...

A relevant question for the organization of large scale research assessments is whether bibliometric evaluation and informed peer review where reviewers know where the work was published, yield similar results. It would suggest, for instance, that less costly bibliometric evaluation might - at...

We review different empirical approaches that researchers have taken to estimate how consumption responds to income changes. We critically evaluate the empirical evidence on the sensitivity of consumption to predicted income changes, distinguishing between the traditional excess sensitivity...

In this paper, the author estimates the age-wealth profile under two different identification assumptions about age, cohort, and time effects. According to the life-cycle model, the two sets of assumptions should yield similar age-wealth profiles. Using the 1984-93 Italian Survey of Household...

This paper explores the determinants of international patterns of housing tenure choice. Up to now, no study has carried out an international comparison in housing tenure using household level data. The Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) provides microeconomic data on fourteen OECD countries. In most...

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...

We search for the circumstances in which the response of national saving to fiscal policy contradicts conventional Keynesian predictions, using data from 18 OECD countries. The data suggest that non-Keynesian effects are associated with large and persistent fiscal impulses. Such responses can be...