Refine
Year of publication
- 2005 (2) (remove)
Document Type
- Working Paper (2) (remove)
Language
- English (2) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (2) (remove)
Keywords
- Einkommen (2)
- Haushalt (2)
- Wohlstand (2)
- Consumption Dynamics (1)
- Financial Information (1)
- Geschichte 1995 (1)
- Geschichte 1998 (1)
- Kaufentscheidung (1)
- Mobility (1)
- Portfolio Choice (1)
Institute
The paper documents lack of awareness of financial assets in the 1995 and 1998 Bank of Italy Surveys of Household Income and Wealth. It then explores the determinants of awareness, and finds that the probability that survey respondents are aware of stocks, mutual funds and investment accounts is positively correlated with education, household resources, long-term bank relations and proxies for social interaction. Lack of financial awareness has important implications for understanding the stockholding puzzle and for estimating stock market participation costs. Klassifikation: E2, D8, G1
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, I30