Household Portfolios Efficiency in the Presence of Restrictions on Investment Opportunities

This paper proposes a new test for verifying the mean-variance efficiency of household portfolios. Unlike the standard statistics, the test takes account of two additional aspects: 1) wealth consists of real estate, held in fixed proportions in the short term, as well as financial assets, and 2) it is not possible to assume short positions in several financial assets. Performing the test on Italian households’ portfolios as they appear in the SHIW 2000 survey, and treating housing as a fixed asset, we obtain an efficiency much more widespread than with common tests, revealing how inaccurate the standard theory is.

Risk Sharing in Defined-Contribution Funded Pension Systems

This paper explores the introduction of collective risk-sharing elements in defined contri-bution pension contracts. We consider status-contingent, age-contingent and asset contingent risk-sharing arrangements. All arrangements raise aggregate welfare, as measured by equiva- lent variations. While working individuals hardly benefit or may even lose, retirees experience substantial welfare gains. An increase in the tax deductability of pension contributions can be beneficial for working cohorts, but comes at the cost of a reduction in aggregate welfare due to efficiency losses.funded pensions, risk-sharing, defined contribution, inter-generational welfare, equivalent variation, stochastic simulations

Inter- and Intra-generational Consequences of Pension Buffer Policy under Demographic, Financial and Economic Shocks

We study numerically the inter- and intra-generational welfare consequences of alternative pension fund policies in response to unexpected demographic, financial and macro-economic shocks. Our analysis is based on an applied many-generation OLG model describing a small-open economy with heterogeneous agents featuring a two-pillar pension system (with PAYG and funded tiers). We explore two policies to avoid underfunding of the pension funds. One is to always first raise the pension contribution rate ("contribution policy"), the other is to always first reduce indexation to productivity and price inflation ("indexation policy"). These policies have different consequences for different generations. Of the existing generations, on average the youngest prefer the indexation policy, while the older generations prefer the con-tribution policy. When expressed in terms of a constant difference in rest-of-life consumption the consequences of switching from one to the other policy are generally non-negligible. They also differ rather widely for the various cohort/income groups. Our stochastic simulations show that pension buffers are highly volatile when the shocks are drawn from realistically modelled multivariate shock processes. Underfunding occurs relatively frequently. Most of the volatility arises from uncertainty about the yield curve (the rate at which pension liabilities are discounted).funded social security, pension fund policy, shocks, funding ratio, stochastic simulations

Luck or Cheating? A Field Experiment on Honesty with Children

We ran an experiment with children to study the development of honesty with age. We asked each child to toss a fair coin in private and to record the outcome (white or black) in a paper sheet. We rewarded only those who reported white. We found a fraction of reported whites signifi…cantly larger than 50%, uniformly across age groups. This suggests that some children cheat when cheating is profi…table and they are not observed. In a second treatment we told children not to cheat. This reminder reduced the probability of reporting white by 18% on average, and signifi…cantly more in girls.honesty; children; fi…eld experiment

Pay Dispersion and Work Performance

The effect of intra-firm pay dispersion on work performance is controversial and the empirical evidence is mixed. High pay dispersion may act as an extra incentive for employees' effort or it may reduce motivation and team cohesiveness. These effects can also coexist and the prevalence of one effect over the other may depend on the use of different definitions of what constitutes a "team." For this paper we collected a unique dataset from the men's major soccer league in Italy. For each match we computed the exact pay dispersion of each work team and estimated its effect on team performance. Our results show that when the work team is considered to consist of only the players who contribute to the result, high pay dispersion has a detrimental impact on team performance. Several robustness checks confirm this result. In addition, we show that enlarging the definition of work team causes this effect to disappear or even become positive. Finally, we find that the detrimental effect of pay dispersion is due to worst individual performance, rather than a reduction of team cooperation.Team productivity, Incentives, Pay dispersion.

Do not Trash the Incentive! Monetary incentives and waste sorting

This paper examines whether monetary incentives are an effective tool for increasing domestic waste sorting. We exploit the exogenous variation in the waste management policies experienced during the years 1999-2008 by the 95 municipalities in the district of Treviso (Italy). We estimate with a panel analysis that pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) incentive schemes increase by 12.3% the sorted-total waste ratio. This increase reflects a change in the behavior of households, who keep unaltered the production of total waste but sort it to a larger extent. Our data show that household behavior is also influenced by the policies of adjacent municipalities.Incentives, environment, waste management, PAYT

Differentiating Indexation in Dutch Pension Funds

We investigate numerically how indexation of funded pensions for inflation can be differentiated across the various groups of fund participants. The pension arrangement is modelled after the Dutch situation. While the aggregate welfare consequences are small, group-specific consequences are more substantial with the workers and future born losing and retirees benefitting from a shift away from uniform indexation. Those welfare shifts result from systematic redistribution of welfare rather than shifts in the benefit of risk sharing provided by the system.indexation, funded pensions, welfare effects, pension buffers, stochastic simulations

Temptation at work

To encourage worker productivity offices prohibit Internet use. Consequently, many employees delay Internet activity to the end of the workday. Recent work in social psychology, however, suggests that using willpower to delay gratification can negatively impact performance. We report data from an experiment where subjects in a Willpower Treatment are asked to resist the temptation to join others in watching a humorous video for 10 minutes. In relation to a baseline treatment that does not require willpower, we show that resisting this temptation detrimentally impacts economic productivity on a subsequent task.temptation, willpower, lab experiment.

Household Portfolios and Risk Taking over Age and Time

We exploit the US Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) from 1998 to 2007 to provide new insights on the evolution of US households’ willingness to undertake portfolio risk. Specifically, we consider four alternative measures of portfolio risk, based on two definitions of portfolio - a narrow one, including financial assets, and a broad one, also including human capital, real estate, business wealth and related debt. The four measures consistently show that risk taking peaked in 2001, many households are willing to undertake only limited risk, and that risk taking increases with wealth, income and financial sophistication. Each measure, nevertheless, provides a different ranking of household risk taking; in addition, the age profile of risk is sensitive to the definition of portfolio. However, risk taking turns out to be constant for a large part of the life cycle, and in particular during the ages 40-60, keeping all the other variables constant

Financial Risk Aversion, Economic Crises and Past Risk Perception

We use a panel dataset from the Dutch Household Survey, covering annually the period 1993-2011, to analyze whether individual risk aversion changes over time with the background economic conditions. Considering six different measures of self-assessed risk aversion, which cover different aspects of risk, our preliminary results show that risk aversion is not stable over time. Its dynamics, however, depends on the type of investor. Those who made no investment in the previous year showed higher risk aversion at the end of the 90s; those who invested, in contrast, showed a steadily constant or decreasing pattern. The gap between the risk aversion of investors and noninvestors was the largest between the end of the 90s and the beginning of the 00s, when the stock market experienced exceptionally high volatility