Research papers

“The strategic bequest motive: evidence from SHARE”

This paper examines whether the empirical evidence supports the strategic bequest motive, as opposed to pure altruism, using data on eleven European countries from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. At issue is whether parents try to influence their children's behaviour by threatening to disinherit them. The availability of internationally comparable data allows exploiting the cross-country variability in inheritance laws and cultural backgrounds to identify the operation of a strategic bequest motive determining the attention that adult children provide to their elderly parents.

“Do Danes and Italians rate life-satisfaction in the same way? Using vignettes to correct for individual-specific scale biases” (with Danilo Cavapozzi, Luca Corazzini and Omar Paccagnella)

Self-reported life satisfaction is highly heterogeneous across similar countries. We show that this phenomenon can be largely explained by the fact that individuals adopt different scales and benchmarks in evaluating themselves. Using a cross sectional dataset on individuals aged 50 and over in ten European countries, we compare estimates from an Ordered Probit in which life satisfaction scales are invariant across respondents with those from a Hopit model in which vignettes are used to correct for individual-specific scale biases. We find that variations in response scales explain a large part of the differences found in raw data. Moreover, the cross-country ranking in life satisfaction dramatically depends on scale biases.

“Housing debt and consumption” (with Peter Simmons)

This paper analyses the effects of house price uncertainty and employment risk on consumption and savings in a finite horizon life-cycle model. The individual has a portfolio composed of two financial assets: a mortgage and a riskless asset in which she can borrow and save. In each period the consumer decides whether to withdraw equity from the house or not, subject to a transaction cost and a constraint on the amount that can be borrowed (up to 100% mortgages are possible). In a CARA framework, we derive a closed-form solution for the value function, the optimal refinancing policy and the consumption function.

Work in progress

“Is it true love? Altruism versus exchange motivated inter-vivos transfers” (with Rob Alessie and Giacomo Pasini). 

“Dynamics of work disability reporting in Europe” (with Danilo Cavapozzi and Omar Paccagnella).

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