The Age-Wealth Profile and The Life-Cycle Hypothesis: a Cohort Analysis with a Time Series of Cross-Sections of Italian Households

In this paper I estimate the age-wealth profile under two different identification assumptions about age, cohort and time effects. According to the life-cycle model, the two set of assumptions should yield similar age-wealth profiles. Using the 1984-1993 Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth, the estimated average annual rate of wealth decumulation in old age is found to be between 3 and 6 percent. As in the life-cycle model, the cohort effect increases with year of birth. However, the results uncover also considerable population heterogeneity: the rates of wealth decumulation are much lower for rich households and households headed by individuals with higher education.Subjective expectations, precautionary saving, excess sensitivity

A Bayesian approach to analyze regional elasticities

This paper presents a bayesian approach to analyze regional elasticity distributions with a regular translog cost function. It is known that a proper statistical analysis concerning elasticities can be performed only with the bayesian approach. Morover we can take advantage of this methodology to form reasonable priors using national data. This way we can produce sounder inferences without much elicition by the analyst. To compare results, this approach is applied to a cost function for the main regions in Italy with a diffuse prior too. Price and substitution elasticities are derived conditional on factor shares or covariates. The low posterior probability than inequality constraints hold with an noninformative prior shows how bayesian methods can be fruitfully employed to assess regional elasticities with a proper prior obtained from national data.

Comparison between different methods of estimating of the relaxation times in the FPU model

After a brief review of the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) conservative system of N nonlinearly coupled oscillators, this paper addresses two problems: first, comparing two indicators for the equipartition, showing that the results are essentially identical; second, finding a method that allows fast integration to reach the long integration times required in this area. In particular this work proposes a symplectic algorithm based on the Fast Fourier Transform

Economic Literacy: An International Comparison

Many studies show that most people are not financially literate and are unfamiliar with even the most basic economic concepts. However, the evidence on the determinants of economic literacy is scant. This paper uses international panel data on 55 countries, merging indicators of economic literacy with a large set of macroeconomic and institutional variables. Results show that there is substantial heterogeneity of financial and economic competence across countries, and that human capital indicators (PISA test scores and college attendance) are positively correlated with economic literacy. Furthermore, inhabitants of countries with more generous social security systems are generally less literate, lending support to the hypothesis that the incentives to acquire economic literacy are related to the amount of resources available for private accumulation.Economic Literacy, Human Capital, Social Security

Financial market integration under EMU

The single most important policy-induced innovation in the international financial system since the collapse of the Bretton-Woods regime is the institution of the European Monetary Union. This paper provides an account of how the process of financial integration has promoted financial development in the euro area. It starts by defining financial integration and how to measure it, analyzes the barriers that can prevent it and the effects of their removal on financial markets, and assesses whether the euro area has actually become more integrated. It then explores to which extent these changes in financial markets have influenced the performance of the euro-area economy, that is, its growth and investment, as well as its ability to adjust to shocks and to allow risk-sharing. The paper concludes analyzing further steps that are required to consolidate financial integration and enhance the future stability of financial markets

Which Kind of Two-Particle States Can Be Teleported through a Three-Particle Quantum Channel?

The use of a three-particle quantum channel to teleport entangled states through a slight modification of the standard teleportation procedure is studied. It is shown that it is not possible to perform successful teleportation of an arbitrary and unknown two-particle entangled state, following our version of the standard teleportation procedure. On the contrary, it is shown which, and in how many different ways, particular classes of two-particle states can be teleported.Comment: 11 pages, Latex, to appear in Found.Phys.Let

On surjunctive monoids

A monoid $M$ is called surjunctive if every injective cellular automata with finite alphabet over $M$ is surjective. We show that all finite monoids, all finitely generated commutative monoids, all cancellative commutative monoids, all residually finite monoids, all finitely generated linear monoids, and all cancellative one-sided amenable monoids are surjunctive. We also prove that every limit of marked surjunctive monoids is itself surjunctive. On the other hand, we show that the bicyclic monoid and, more generally, all monoids containing a submonoid isomorphic to the bicyclic monoid are non-surjunctive

Expansive actions with specification on uniform spaces, topological entropy, and the Myhill property

We prove that every expansive continuous action with the weak specification property of an amenable group $G$ on a compact Hausdorff space $X$ has the Myhill property, i.e., every pre-injective continuous self-mapping of $X$ commuting with the action of $G$ on $X$ is surjective. This extends a result previously obtained by Hanfeng Li in the case when $X$ is metrizable.Comment: We have corrected a few typos and removed part (iii) of Theorem 4.2. It is accepted for publication in the Journal of Dynamical and Control System