Abstract We exploit the US Survey of Consumer Finances from 1998 to 2010 to study households’ portfolio risk. We compare alternative measures of ex-ante risk, based on a financial portfolio including deposits, bonds, and stocks, or a broader portfolio also including real estate, business wealth, and related debt. The measures provide different rankings of portfolio risk, but they all show a skewed distribution with many households bearing limited risk. Large wealth holdings lead to more aggressive risk positions. Moreover, risk falls at the beginning of the sample period and rises at the end, together with the business cycle.

We use household-level data covering a ten-year period (1984 to 1993) to investigate the likely determinants of the Italian recession of 1993, the first year after WWII when private consumption fell. Consumption fell most for working-age households and for the self-employed. Our evidence is consistent with the response to permanent negative shocks due to the major pension reform of 1992 and the introduction of stricter tax-compliance measures for the self-employed. This is still true when we control for the role played by job losses and the collapse of the retail sector that characterized the early 1990s.

This paper reports a three-phase experiment on a stylized labor market. In the first two phases, agents face simple games, which we use to estimate subjects' social and reciprocity concerns. In the last phase, four principals compete by offering agents a contract from a fixed menu. Then, agents “choose to work” for a principal by selecting one of the available contracts. We find that (i) (heterogeneous) social preferences are significant determinants of choices, (ii) for both principals and agents, strategic uncertainty aversion is a stronger determinant of choices than fairness, and (iii) agents display a marked propensity to work for principals with similar distributional concerns. (JEL D82, D86, J41)