Superior Information, Income Shocks and the Permanent Income Hypothesis

According to the permanent income hypothesis with quadratic preferences, savings should react only to transitory income shocks, but not to permanent shocks. The problem is that income shock components are not separately observable. I show how the combination of income realizations with subjective expectations can help to identify separately the transitory and the permanent shock to income, thus providing a powerful test of the theory. The empirical analysis is performed on a sample of Italian households drawn from the 1989-1991 Survey of Household Income and Wealth.Subjective expectations, income shocks, permanent income hypothesis

Recommendations in the Italian Labour Market: An Empirical Analysis

In this paper I focus on one of the most peculiar features of the Italian labour market: the importance played by recommendations in the hiring of new personnel. It is usually argued that, in contrast with the experience of other industrialized countries, in Italy letters of reference are not used to signal job applicants' qualities, but only to obtain a favoured treatment in the hiring process. Anecdotal evidence suggests that firms have used those practices both to overcome rigid hiring regulation and to weaken unions' power. In the empirical analysis, conducted on data drawn from the 1991 Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth, I show that while workers seeking through recommendations increase the chance of being hired, they also pay a ''recommendation fee'' vis-a-vis workers hired through more traditional mechanisms. I provide various explanations for these results.Labour market imperfections, Earnings function

Fiscal policy and MPC heterogeneity

We use responses to survey questions in the 2010 Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth that ask consumers how much of an unexpected transitory income change they would consume. We find that the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is 48 percent on average, and that there is substantial heterogeneity in the distribution. We find that households with low cash-on-hand exhibit a much higher MPC than affluent households, which is in agreement with models with precautionary savings where income risk plays an important role. The results have important implications for the evaluation of fiscal policy, and for predicting household responses to tax reforms and redistributive policies. In particular, we find that a debt-financed increase in transfers of 1 percent of national disposable income targeted to the bottom decile of the cash-on-hand distribution would increase aggregate consumption by 0.82 percent. Furthermore, we find that redistributing 1% of national disposable income from the top to the bottom decile of the income distribution would boost aggregate consumption by 0.33%

Intertemporal choice and consumption mobility

The theory of intertemporal consumption choice makes sharp predictions about the evolution of the entire distribution of household consumption, not just about its conditional mean. In the paper, we study the empirical transition matrix of consumption using a panel drawn from the Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth. We estimate the parameters that minimize the distance between the empirical and the theoretical transition matrix of the consumption distribution. The transition matrix generated by our estimates matches remarkably well the empirical matrix, both in the aggregate and in samples stratified by education. Our estimates strongly reject the consumption insurance model and suggest that households smooth income shocks to a lesser extent than implied by the permanent income hypothesis. Klassifikation: D52, D91, I3

The Dynamics of Household Wealth Accumulation in Italy

We examine the dynamics of wealth accumulation distribution in Italy using data drawn from the Survey of Household Income and Wealth, a representative sample of the Italian population conducted by the Bank of Italy. We compare survey data with national accounts data and discuss sample representativeness, attrition, and measurement issues. We then look at wealth inequality (the cross-sectional dispersion of wealth), wealth mobility (individual transitions across the wealth distribution), and examine the age profile of wealth using repeated cross-sectional data. Finally, we consider various explanations for the pattern of wealth accumulation in Italy, focusing on retirement, bequests, income risk, health shocks, and credit market imperfections.Wealth accumulation, Inequality, Mobility

Tax Incentives and the Demand for Life Insurance: Evidence from Italy

The theoretical literature suggests that taxation can have a large impact on household portfolio selection and allocation. In this paper we consider the tax treatment of life insurance, considering the cancellation of tax incentives in Italian life insurance contracts for investors with high marginal tax rates and the introduction of incentives for those with low rates. Using repeated cross-sectional data from 1989 to 1998, we find that the tax reforms had no effect on the decision to invest in life insurance or the amount invested. The likely explanations are the lack of information and lack of committment to long-term investment.Tax incentives, Saving, Portfolio choice

Earnings, consumption and lifecycle choices

We discuss recent developments in the literature that studies how the dynamics of earnings and wages affect consumption choices over the life cycle. We start by analyzing the theoretical impact of income changes on consumption - highlighting the role of persistence, information, size and insurability of changes in economic resources. We next examine the empirical contributions, distinguishing between papers that use only income data and those that use both income and consumption data. The latter do this for two purposes. First, one can make explicit assumptions about the structure of credit and insurance markets and identify the income process or the information set of the individuals. Second, one can assume that the income process or the amount of information that consumers have are known and tests the implications of the theory. In general there is an identification issue that is only recently being addressed, with better data or better "experiments". We conclude with a discussion of the literature that endogenize people's earnings and therefore change the nature of risk faced by households.

Tax Incentives for Household Saving and Borrowing

The paper reviews the literature on these tax incentives, with special focus on long-term saving, housing, and household liabilities. The paper addresses several areas of policy intervention: (1) the interest rate effect on personal saving; (2) the effect of tax incentives on long-term mandatory saving programs; (3) government programs that target saving for home purchase; (4) government programs that target health and saving for education; (5) the effect of tax incentives to borrow, rather than to save. For each of these five important issues, the paper provides empirical evidence on the main characteristics of government programs, with a special focus on middle-income countries. It also addresses a number of issues that should be of interest to policy-makers. First of all, on which grounds government policy should target some assets rather than others. Second, if tax-sheltered assets and liabilities lead to substitution away from more heavily taxed savings instruments or if they affect the overall level of saving. And finally, if there is any lesson that can be drawn from the experience of developed countries for the design of saving and borrowing incentives in middle-income countries.

Information, habits, and consumption behavior: evidence from micro data

Most of the empirical literature on consumption behaviour over the last decades has focused on estimating Euler equations. However, there is now consensus that data-related problems make this approach unfruitful, especially for answering policy relevant issues. Alternatively, many papers have proposed using the consumption function to forecast behaviour. This paper follows in this tradition, by deriving an analytical consumption function in the presence of intertemporal non-separabilities, "superior information", and income shocks of different nature, both transitory and permanent. The results provide evidence for durability, and show that people are relatively better at forecasting short-term rather than long-term shocks JEL Classification: D11, D12, D82, E21Consumption, Durability, habit persistence, panel data, Superior Information