The general elections held in February 2013 marked an earthquake in Italian politics. The two coalitions on the center-left and center-right that had governed Italy alternately between 1996 and 2011 together lost 11 million votes compared to the 2008 elections. The explanations advanced for this...

This paper empirically investigates complementarities between different sources of research funding with regard to academic publishing. We find for a sample of UK engineering academics that competitive funding is associated with an increase in ex-post publications but that industry funding...

A seller dynamically sells a divisible good to a buyer. It is common knowledge that there are gains from trade and that the gains per unit are decreasing. Payoffs are interdependent as in Akerlof's market for lemons. The seller is informed about the good's quality. The buyer makes an offer in...

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...

We solve a mean-variance optimisation problem of a defined contribution pension scheme in the accumulation phase. The financial market consists of: (i) the risk-free asset, (ii) a risky asset following a GBM, and (iii) a bond driven by a stochastic interest rate following the Vasicek [1977]...

Traditionally quantitative models that have studied households' port- folio choice have focused exclusively on the different risk properties of alternative financial assets. In the present paper we take a different ap- proach and assume that assets also differ in their liquidity. We construct a...

I study an auction format called penny auctions. In these auctions, every bid increases the price by a small amount, but it is costly to place a bid. The auction ends if more than some predetermined amount of time has passed since the last bid. Outcomes of real penny auctions are surprising:...

This paper provides a closed-form Value-at-Risk (VaR) for the net exposure of an annuity provider, taking into account both mortality and interest-rate risk, on both assets and liabilities. It builds a classical risk- return frontier and shows that hedging strategies - such as the transfer of...

I develop a model in which individual time discount rates have a larger eect on hu- man capital accumulation when credit constraints are binding. Impatient individuals obtain less schooling when borrowing constraints limit the ability to nance consump- tion during school. Using data from the...

In this paper we focus on the relative role of job finding and job exit in shaping the employment risk over the life cycle. Using Italian labor market data we document that the risk of being fired and the chance of reemployment display substantial heterogeneity depending on age, cohort and...