Luigi Pistaferri

Stanford University | SU · Department of Economics

The Global Repository of Income Dynamics (GRID) is a new open‐access, cross‐country database that contains a wide range of micro statistics on income inequality, dynamics, and mobility. It has four key characteristics: it is built on micro panel data drawn from administrative records; it fully exploits the longitudinal dimension of the underlying d...

This paper summarizes statistics on the key aspects of the distribution of earnings levels and earnings changes using administrative (social security) data from Italy between 1985 and 2016. During the time covered by our data, earnings inequality and earnings volatility increased, while earnings mobility did not change significantly. We connect the...

We measure wealth effects on consumption using a novel research design: responses to direct survey questions asking how much a household would change consumption in response to unexpected (positive and negative) shocks to own home value. The average wealth effect is in the 2-5% range, in line with econometric estimates that associate changes in hou...

Disability insurance provides protection against health shocks that limit the ability to work. In most countries, these programmes are large and growing, both in expenditure and in number of recipients. We discuss the traditional trade‐off between insurance and incentives in providing this insurance, with a focus on the US and UK experiences. There...

Abstract We review the recent literature on the risk sharing role of the firm. We provide a framework for studying risk sharing between workers and firm owners vis-\grave{a}-vis firms specific shocks of different nature. We show how this framework can be taken to the data to provide estimates of the extent of insurance within the firm. Estimates fr...

We provide a systematic analysis of the properties of individual returns to wealth using 12 years of population data from Norway's administrative tax records. We document a number of novel results. First, individuals earn markedly different average returns on their net worth (a standard deviation of 22.1%) and on its components. Second, heterogenei...

We provide a life-cycle framework for comparing insurance and disincentive effects of disability benefits. The risks that individuals face and the parameters of the Disability Insurance (DI ) program are estimated from consumption, health, disability insurance, and wage data. We characterize the effects of disability insurance and study how policy...

Assessing the importance of uninsurable wage risk for individual financial choices faces two challenges. First, the identification of the marginal effect requires a measure of at least one component of risk that cannot be diversified or avoided. Moreover, measures of uninsurable wage risk must vary over time to eliminate unobserved heterogeneity. S...

We propose a new approach to identify the strength of the precautionary motive and the extent of self-insurance in response to earnings risk based on Euler equation estimates. To address endogeneity problems, we use Norwegian administrative data and instrument consumption and earnings volatility with the variance of firm-specific shocks. The instru...

We provide a lifecycle framework for comparing the insurance value and the incentive cost of disability benefits. We estimate the risks that individuals face and the parameters governing the disability insurance program using longitudinal US data on consumption, health, disability insurance, and wages. We characterize the economic effects of disabi...

We use responses to survey questions in the 2010 Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth that ask consumers how much of an unexpected transitory income change they would consume. We find that the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is 48 percent on average, and that there is substantial heterogeneity in the distribution. We find that househo...

Since the late 1970s there has been a remarkable and persistent increase in wage inequality in the US and other industrialized countries. Researchers have also documented an increase in the dispersion of individual earnings, household (pooled) earnings, household disposable income, and (less consistently) consumption. Some of the changes in inequal...

In this paper we examine the link between wage inequality and consumption inequality using a life cycle model that incorporates household consumption and family labor supply decisions. We derive analytical expressions based on approximations for the dynamics of consumption, hours, and earnings of two earners in the presence of correlated wage shock...

We discuss recent developments in the literature that studies how the dynamics of earnings and wages affect consumption choices over the life cycle. We start by analyzing the theoretical impact of income changes on consumption-highlighting the role of persistence, information, size and insurability of changes in economic resources. We next examine...

We review different empirical approaches that researchers have taken to estimate how consumption responds to income changes. We critically evaluate the empirical evidence on the sensitivity of consumption to predicted income changes, distinguishing between the traditional excess sensitivity tests, and the effect of predicted income increases and in...

We introduce a new hybrid approach to joint estimation of Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES) for high quantiles of return distributions. We investigate the relative performance of VaR and ES models using daily returns for sixteen stock market indices (eight from developed and eight from emerging markets) prior to and during the 2008 fi...

We discuss recent developments in the literature that studies how the dynamics of earnings and wages affect consumption choices over the life cycle. We start by analyzing the theoretical impact of income changes on consumption - highlighting the role of persistence, information, size and insurability of changes in economic resources. We next examin...

We use variation in the degree of development of local credit markets and matched employer–employee data to assess the role of the firm as an internal credit market. We find that firms operating in less financially developed markets offer lower entry wages but faster wage growth than firms in more financially developed markets. This helps firms fin...

This paper presents stylized facts on labor supply, income, consumption, wealth, and several measures of consumption and income inequality drawn from the 1980–2006 Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) conducted by the Bank of Italy. The SHIW provides information on consumption, income and wealth, and a sizable panel component that allows ec...

We exploit time variation in the degree of development of local credit markets and matched employer-employee data to assess the role of the rm as an internal credit market. In less developed local credit markets rms can oer a atter wage-tenure pro le than rms in more developed credit markets to lend implicitly to their workers or oer a steeper pro...

Data and codes to replicate all table and figures of the article.

We specify a life-cycle model of consumption, labor supply and job mobility in an economy with search frictions. We distinguish different sources of risk, including shocks to productivity, job arrival, and job destruction. Allowing for job mobility has a large effect on the estimate of productivity risk. Increases in the latter impose a considerabl...

Recent models with liquidity constraints and impatience emphasize that consumers use savings to buffer income fluctuations. When wealth is below an optimal target, consumers try to increase their buffer stock of wealth by saving more. When it is above target, they increase consumption. This important implication of the buffer stock model of saving...

This paper examines the link between income and consumption inequality. We create panel data on consumption for the Panel Study of Income Dynamics using an imputation procedure based on food demand estimates from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. We document a disjuncture between income and consumption inequality over the 1980s and show that it can...

The international financial crisis manifests itself in Ireland not only as a crisis of the banking system, but also as a major fiscal crisis, aggravated by years of soft revenue policy and a housing bubble that has burst spectacularly. The severe drop in economic output results in a crisis of employment and a definitive end to the ‘Celtic Tiger’ er...

We argue that health care quality has an important impact on economic inequality and on saving behavior. We exploit district-wide variability in health care quality provided by the Italian universal public health system to identify the effect of quality on income inequality, health inequality and precautionary saving. We find that in lower quality...

Before 1992 mortgage interests in Italy were fully tax deductible up to 3500 Euro (7000 for two cosigners). In 1992–1994 the government implemented a series of tax reforms whose ultimate effect was to eliminate the relation between the after-tax mortgage rate and the marginal tax rate. Using data from the 1989–2002 Survey of Household Income and We...

This paper studies the costs of adjusting employment, distinguishing between firms’ firing and workers’ mobility costs. We construct a simple dynamic general equilibrium model of labor demand and supply and show that only the joint response of employment and wages to firm level shocks can discriminate between the two types of costs. We use matched...

This paper studies the costs of adjusting employment, distinguishing between firms' firing and workers' mobility costs. We construct a simple dynamic general equilibrium model of labour demand and supply and show that only the joint response of employment and wages to firm level shocks can discriminate between the two types of costs. We use matched...

The theory of intertemporal consumption choice makes sharp predictions about the evolution of the entire distribution of household consumption, not just about its conditional mean. In the paper, we study the empirical transition matrix of consumption using a panel drawn from the Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth. We estimate the p...

Most of the empirical literature on consumption behaviour over the last decades has focused on estimating Euler equations. However, there is now consensus that data-related problems make this approach unfruitful, especially for answering policy relevant issues. Alternatively, many papers have proposed using the consumption function to forecast beha...

The authors investigate how worker-owned and capitalist enterprises differ with respect to wages, employment, and capital in Italy, the market economy with the greatest incidence of worker-owned and worker-managed firms. Estimates calculated using a matched employer-worker panel data set for the years 1982-94 largely corroborate the implications of...

We use matched employer-employees data for Italy to study the joint response of wages and employment to firm-level shocks. We construct a simple dynamic general equilibrium model of labor demand and supply that allows us to identify separately firing (or internal) and mobility (or external) adjustment costs. We show that the two type of costs canno...

The full insurance hypothesis states that shocks to the firm's performance do not affect workers' compensation. In principal-agent models with moral hazard, firms trade off insurance and incentives to induce workers to supply the optimal level of effort. We use a long panel of matched employer-employee data to test the theoretical predictions of pr...

We characterize infrequent durables stock adjustment by consumers who also derive utility from non-durable consumption flows in the presence of idiosyncratic income uncertainty. The data we analyse include subjective future income uncertainty measures, which we use as instruments in the estimation of relevant parameters of heterogeneous consumers'...

In this paper we discuss an empirical strategy that allows researchers to impute consumption data from the CEX to the PSID. The strategy consists of inverting a demand for food equation estimated in the CEX. We discuss the conditions under which such procedure is successful in replicating the trends of the first two moments of the consumption distr...

Before 1992 mortgage interest in Italy was fully tax deductible up to 3,500 euro (7,000 for two cosigners). Between 1992-94 the government implemented a series of tax reforms whose ultimate effect was to cancel the relation between the after-tax mortgage rate and the marginal tax rate. Using data from the 1987-2000 Survey of Household Income and We...

This paper uses panel data on household consumption and income to describe the transmission of income inequality into consumption inequality. We do this by contrasting shifts in the cross-sectional distribution of income growth with shifts in the cross-sectional distribution of consumption growth. Our aim is to evaluate the time series pattern of p...

We define the distinction between productivity and employment risk and estimate the components of risk using wage and mobility data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We then calibrate a model of intertemporal consumption and labor supply and study the effect of the two sources of risk on precautionary saving and labor supply. Finally, we mea...

Recent theoretical work has shown the importance of measuring microeconomic uncertainty for models of both general and partial equilibrium under imperfect insurance. In this paper the assumption of i.i.d. income innovations used in previous empirical studies is removed and the focus of the analysis is placed on models for the conditional variance o...

The Paper reviews the literature on these tax incentives, with special focus on long-term saving, housing, and household liabilities. The Paper addresses several areas of policy intervention: (1) the interest rate effect on personal saving; (2) the effect of tax incentives on long-term mandatory saving programmes; (3) government programmes that tar...

The paper analyses the effect of equity-price shocks on current account positions for the G-7 industrialized countries during 1974–2007. It uses a Bayesian vector autoregression with sign restrictions for the identification of equity-price shocks and to test empirically for their effect on current accounts. Such shocks are found to exert a sizable...

The mean and higher moments of the distribution of future income are crucial determinants of individual choices. These moments are usually estimated in panel data from past income realizations. In this article we rely instead on subjective expectations available in the 1995 Survey of Household Income and Wealth, a large random sample representative...

We study the eect of uncertainty on optimal adjustment of durable good stocks, and confront the relevant theoretical insights with a data set featuring extensive information on disaggregated durable goods and subjective measures of future income uncertainty. We discuss the intertemporal optimization problem of a consumer who derives utility both fr...

The theoretical literature suggests that taxation can have a large impact on household portfolio selection and allocation. In this paper we analyze the tax treatment of life insurance, considering the cancellation of tax incentives in Italian life insurance contracts for investors with high marginal tax rates and the introduction of incentives for...

I modify the uniform-price auction rules in allowing the seller to ration bidders. This allows me to provide a strategic foundation for underpricing when the seller has an interest in ownership dispersion. Moreover, many of the so-called "collusive-seeming" equilibria disappear.

Why are similar workers paid differently? I review and compare two lines of research that have recently witnessed great progress in addressing “unexplained” wage inequality: (i) worker unobserved heterogeneity in, and sorting by, human capital; (ii) firms’ monopsony power in labor markets characterized by job search frictions. Both lines share a vi...

We examine the dynamics of wealth accumulation distribution in Italy using data drawn from the Survey of Household Income and Wealth, a representative survey of the Italian population conducted by the Bank of Italy. We compare survey data with National Accounts data and discuss sample representativeness, attrition and measurement issues. We then lo...

The theory of full consumption insurance posits that households are insulated from all idiosyncratic shocks so that the ratio of the marginal utilities of consumption of any two households is constant over time. Consumption insurance therefore implies absence of consumption mobility between any two time periods. This implication requires knowledge...

We test for precautionary saving and excess sensitivity of consumption to predicted income growth using a 1989–1993 panel survey of Italian households that has measures of subjective income and inflation expectations. These expectations provide a powerful instrument for predicting income growth. The empirical specification controls for predictable...

I study the dynamics of household consumption and income. My thesis consists of four papers, detailed as follows. In the first paper, I test for precautionary savings and excess sensitivity of consumption using a panel of Italian households that has measures of income expectations. The latter provide a powerful instrument for predicting income grow...

Expectations and riskiness of future earnings are crucial determinants of individuals' intertemporal choices. Yet, the empirical literature lacks reliable measures of the distribution of future income. Lacking direct observability, the latter is usually estimated inferring the mean, the variance and other moments of the distribution from income rea...

We use longitudinal data on consumption, disability status, disability insurance recipiency, and earnings to measure the welfare loss of disability shocks. We decompose earnings risk into shocks due to the emergency of disability and shocks to general productivity. We then examine the issue of optimality of the DI program, accounting for moral haza...