This paper analyzes how combining firms into either groups or conglomerates affects their credit standing, as measured by their de- fault probabilities, recovery rates and credit spreads. Each combina- tion offers protection against default to its affiliates, and issues debt to optimize the...

This paper explores a process which I denote as “young workforce disposal” (YWD). YWD reflects the fact that many young people enter the labor market as dependent employees, at some later time they are dismissed and (presumably) move into never-ending unemployment. Long term unemployment may...

L'aggancio tra i dati WHIP e quelli del Casellario degli Attivi consente l'osservazione di tutti i percorsi lavorativi, non solo quelli coperti dai dati INPS (o WHIP). Questa procedura ha permesso di dare una parziale risposta ad una domanda che ci si pone quando si usano i dati WHIP, o di fonte...

In questo rapporto si presentano due informazioni sviluppate partendo dagli archivi degli episodi di lavoro dipendente di WHIP (archivi RL_annui_): gli oneri sociali obbligatori (variabile oneri_sociali) e il costo del lavoro (variabile costo_lavoro). Le stime degli oneri sociali obbligatori e...

Household portfolios include risky bonds, beyond stocks, and respond to permanent labour income shocks. This paper brings these features into a life-cycle setting, and shows that optimal stock investment is constant or increasing in age before retirement for realistic parameter combinations. The...

This paper is about very long term unemployment (a more appropriate denomination could be "out-of-official-employment") in Italy, its concentration and the process of young worker disposal, an important, yet unexplored, determinant. “Very long” is not just “long”: we are dealing with...

This paper examines the ex-post performance of optimal portfolios with predictable returns, when the investor horizon ranges from one month to ten years. Due to the investor's ability to anticipate shifts from bull to bear markets, predictability involves the risk premium, volatility and...

Recent research [e.g., DeMiguel, Garlappi and Uppal, (2009a), Rev. Fin. Studies] has cast doubts on the out-of-sample performance of optimizing portfolio strategies relative to a naive, equally-weighted ones. However, most of the existing results concern the simple case in which an investor has...

Do equity markets help diversifying away industry-related labor income risk? This paper reconsiders the hedging role of stock markets by focusing on international equity diversification, rather than domestic asset allocation, and on industry wage, rather than individual labor income. We test for...