The Effect Of Population Ageing On Household Portfolio Choices In Italy

Based on widely accepted evidence on the exceptional ageing of the Italian population, this paper aims to assess the impact of ageing on household portfolios in Italy and hence ultimately on financial markets. To this end, we use data taken by the Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) over the last decade and we analyse the average household portfolio in relation to demographic characteristics. In contrast to some results reported in the literature for the US, we find that financial choices of Italian households are sensibly affected by age. It follows that the exceptional ageing of the population in Italy is going to have relevant consequences on the Italian financial market.

The Economics of Aging presents results from an ongoing National Bureau of Economic Research project. Contributors consider the housing mobility and living arrangements of the elderly, their labor force participation and retirement, the economics of their health care, and their financial status. The goal of the research is to further our understanding both of the factors that determine the well-being of the elderly and of the consequences that follow from an increasingly older population with longer individual life spans. Each paper is accompanied by critical commentary.

Greater longevity is an indicator of human progress in general. Increased life expectancy and lower fertility rates are changing the population structure worldwide in a major way: the proportion of older persons is rapidly increasing, a process known as population ageing. The process is inevitable and is already advanced in developed countries and progressing quite rapidly in developing ones. The 2007 Survey analyses the implications of population ageing for social and economic development around the world, while recognising that it offers both challenges and opportunities. Among the most pressing issues is that arising from the prospect of a smaller labour force having to support an increasingly larger older population. Paralleling increased longevity are the changes in intergenerational relationships that may affect the provision of care and income security for older persons, particularly in developing countries where family transfers play a major role. At the same time, it is also necessary for societies to fully recognise and better harness the productive and social contributions that older persons can make but are in many instances prevented from making. The Survey argues that the challenges are not insurmountable, but that societies everywhere need to put in place the policies required to confront those challenges effectively and to ensure an adequate standard of living for each of their members, while respecting and promoting the contribution and participation of all.

A straightforward guide focused on life cycle investing-namely aging, retirement, and pensions Life cycle investing and the implications of aging, retirement, and pensions continues to grow in importance. With people living longer, the relative and absolute number of retirees is growing while the number of workers contributing to pension funds is declining. This reliable resource develops a detailed economic analysis-at the micro (individual) and macro (economy wide) levels-which addresses issues regarding the economics of an aging population. Topics touched upon include retirement and the associated health care funding of the aged as well as social security and the asset classes that are considered asset-liability choices over time. The probability of achieving adequate return patterns from various investment strategies and asset classes is reviewed Shares rich insights on the aging, retirement, and pensions dilemma An assessment of the resources the real economy will be able to commit to non-workers is provided The three pillars of retirement are social security, company pensions, and private savings. Each of these pillars is confronted with a variety of asset-liability problems, and this book will addresses them.

Editor Wolff is a leading authority on income, wealth, and inequality in the US, and contributing authors are well-respected experts in their field. Overall, the research is high quality, and most papers include a substantial list of references. A plethora of data is considered, and much statistical evidence is presented. . . . A useful contribution to the literature on income distribution and wealth inequality. Recommended. E. Kacapyr, Choice The contributors to this comprehensive book compile and analyse the latest data available on household wealth using, as case studies, the United States, Canada, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Finland during the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. The authors show that in the US, trends are highlighted in terms of wealth holdings, among the low-income population, along with changes in wealth polarization, racial differences in wealth holdings, and the dynamics of portfolio choices. The consensus between the authors is that wealth inequality has generally risen among these OECD countries since the early 1980s, although Germany stands out as an exception. In the case of the US, it is also noted that wealth holdings have generally failed to improve among low-income families and that the racial wealth gap widened during the late 1980s. International Perspectives on Household Wealth also contains new results on a number of topics, including measures and changes of wealth polarization in the US, measurement and changes of portfolio span in the US, asset holdings of low-income households in the US, and the effects of parental resources on asset holdings in Chile. Academic, government, and public policy economists in OECD countries, as well as those in so-called middle-income countries around the world, will find much to engage them within this book. It will also appeal to academics and researchers of international and welfare economics and other social scientists interested in the issue of inequality.

Arbitrage, State Prices and Portfolio Theory / Philip h. Dybvig and Stephen a. Ross / - Intertemporal Asset Pricing Theory / Darrell Duffle / - Tests of Multifactor Pricing Models, Volatility Bounds and Portfolio Performance / Wayne E. Ferson / - Consumption-Based Asset Pricing / John y Campbell / - The Equity Premium in Retrospect / Rainish Mehra and Edward c. Prescott / - Anomalies and Market Efficiency / William Schwert / - Are Financial Assets Priced Locally or Globally? / G. Andrew Karolyi and Rene M. Stuli / - Microstructure and Asset Pricing / David Easley and Maureen O'hara / - A Survey of Behavioral Finance / Nicholas Barberis and Richard Thaler / - Derivatives / Robert E. Whaley / - Fixed-Income Pricing / Qiang Dai and Kenneth J. Singleton.

Academic finance has had a remarkable impact on many financial services. Yet long-term investors have received curiously little guidance from academic financial economists. Mean-variance analysis, developed almost fifty years ago, has provided a basic paradigm for portfolio choice. This approach usefully emphasizes the ability of diversification to reduce risk, but it ignores several critically important factors. Most notably, the analysis is static; it assumes that investors care only about risks to wealth one period ahead. However, many investors—-both individuals and institutions such as charitable foundations or universities—-seek to finance a stream of consumption over a long lifetime. In addition, mean-variance analysis treats financial wealth in isolation from income. Long-term investors typically receive a stream of income and use it, along with financial wealth, to support their consumption. At the theoretical level, it is well understood that the solution to a long-term portfolio choice problem can be very different from the solution to a short-term problem. Long-term investors care about intertemporal shocks to investment opportunities and labor income as well as shocks to wealth itself, and they may use financial assets to hedge their intertemporal risks. This should be important in practice because there is a great deal of empirical evidence that investment opportunities—-both interest rates and risk premia on bonds and stocks—-vary through time. Yet this insight has had little influence on investment practice because it is hard to solve for optimal portfolios in intertemporal models. This book seeks to develop the intertemporal approach into an empirical paradigm that can compete with the standard mean-variance analysis. The book shows that long-term inflation-indexed bonds are the riskless asset for long-term investors, it explains the conditions under which stocks are safer assets for long-term than for short-term investors, and it shows how labor income influences portfolio choice. These results shed new light on the rules of thumb used by financial planners. The book explains recent advances in both analytical and numerical methods, and shows how they can be used to understand the portfolio choice problems of long-term investors.

Handbook of the Economics of Population Aging synthesizes the economic literature on aging and the subjects associated with it, including social insurance and healthcare costs, both of which are of interest to policymakers and academics. These volumes, the first of a new subseries in the Handbooks in Economics, describe and analyze scholarship created since the inception of serious attention began in the late 1970s, including information from general economics journals, from various field journals in economics, especially, but not exclusively, those covering labor markets and human resource issues, from interdisciplinary social science and life science journals, and from papers by economists published in journals associated with gerontology, history, sociology, political science, and demography, amongst others. Dissolves the barriers between policymakers and scholars by presenting comprehensive portraits of social and theoretical issues Synthesizes valuable data on the topic from a variety of journals dating back to the late 1970s in a convenient, comprehensive resource Presents diverse perspectives on subjects that can be closely associated with national and regional concerns Offers comprehensive, critical reviews and expositions of the essential aspects of the economics of population aging

Theoretical and empirical analysis of the structure of household portfolios.