Due to wealth effects, the price of a security may vary with the realization of an underlying risk factor even when the security's dividend is independent of that factor. This paper highlights a crucial component of these effects hitherto ignored by the literature: changes in wealth do not alter...

Currently, financial economics is unable to predict changes in asset prices with respect to changes in the underlying risk factors, even when an asset's dividend is independent of a given factor. This paper takes steps towards addressing this issue by highlighting a crucial component of wealth...

In post-Unification Italy the cyclical movements of the economy largely reflected those in the production of durable goods. The engineering industry has been seen as one that transformed metal into machines: its metal consumption suggests that investment in machinery followed the Kuznets-cycle...

In Italy two censuses were taken in 1911: the usual demographic census, that contains labor-force data, and the first industrial census, that contains employment data. The two yield aggregate figures that are very far apart. The literature directly concerned with estimating industrial employment...

This paper presents the second-generation estimates for the Italian engineering industry in 1911, a year documented both by the customary demographic census, and the first industrial census. The first part of this paper uses the census data to estimate the industry’s value added, sector...

In the literature the (Italian) engineering industry is seen as one that transformed metal into machines; its time path is inferred from that of its consumption of metal. Newly recovered evidence indicates that far more metal was turned into (traditional) hardware than into (modern) machines....

We provide a general characterization of diffusion processes, allowing to analyze both risk-sharing and contagion at the same time. We show that interdependencies are beneficial when the economic environment is favorable, and detrimental when the economic environment deteriorates. The risk of...

In a single-commodity, pure-exchange, representative-agent economy with many Lucas' trees whose dividends are geometric Brownian motions, I study the comparative statics of the prices of these assets with respect to the current Brownian realization. As is well-known, due to wealth effects, a...