CCA, Centre for Research on Pensions and Welfare Policies (CeRP)

Italy

The Collegio Carlo Alberto - Centro di Ricerca e Alta Formazione fosters research and teaching in economics, finance, political science and, in general, in social sciences. The Collegio shares the values and best practices of the international academic community. Policy-oriented research activities are carried out by the Research Units of the Collegio, among which the Collegio Carlo Alberto- Centro di Ricerca e Alta Formazione plays a central role in research on retirement and savings.

Key personnel involved in the project

Elsa Fornero, Mariacristina Rossi, Principal Investigators
Giovanna Nicodano, Annamaria Lusardi, Riccardo Calcagno Co–Investigators

Main tasks attributed to them in the project

Our research explores how pension plans can best communicate and frame risk, project pension benefits and replacement rates. Clear communication will help individuals make good saving, investment and insurance decisions. This research can also help policy makers in designing reporting standards for pension funds and individual pension plans.

We compare current practices in the Netherlands and Italy and investigate how they can be improved. We plan to work with focus groups and conduct both field and laboratory experiments. We also explore how information provision and financial literacy may affect saving, investment and insurance decisions, and whether we can enhance financial literacy and affect behaviours in a cost-effective way. To accomplish this, we will test and develop micro econometric models in which financial literacy, consumption and wealth are jointly determined. We plan to test these models using comparative European data from the Survey of Health, Aging, Retirement in Europa (SHARE).

Short profile of all personnel and previous relevant experience

Elsa Fornero is minister of labour, social policies and equal opportunities and Professor of Economics at the University of Turin. She is senior honorary fellow of Collegio Carlo Alberto and founder and Scientific Coordinator of CeRP – “Center for Research on Pensions and Welfare Policies”. Elsa worked as an independent consultant at the World Bank to evaluate the impact of pension reforms in Russia, Latvia, Macedonia, Albania. She has also worked as an evaluator for the Italian Ministry of the University and Research, Belgian Federal Science Policy Office and European Science Foundation.

Elsa is the author of many publications about public and private pension systems, pension reforms, population aging, households saving, retiring choices and life insurance. More recently she has been studying the financial literacy and financial education. In 2011, she has been awarded “La Mela d’Oro” prize “Women: innovation and human capital”, by Marisa Bellisario Foundation.

Anna Maria Lusardi is professor of economics and accountancy at the George Washington University School of Business. She is on the board of directors of the Council for Economic Education, and is director of the Financial Literacy Center (FLC). She is member of the Scientific Committee of CeRP. She has advised the US Treasury, the US Social Security Administration, the Dutch Central Bank, and the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center on issues related to financial literacy and saving. Her research interests focus on financial literacy, consumer finance, macroeconomics and monetary economics, and entrepreneurship.

Anna has published in top journals such as Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Journal of Monetary Economics and Journal of Financial Economics. She also wrote several books among which “Overcoming the Saving Slump: How to Increase the Effectiveness of Financial Education and Saving Programs”. In 2007, with Olivia Mitchell, she won the Fidelity Pyramid Prize, an award given to authors of published applied research that best helps address the goal of improving lifelong financial well-being for Americans.

Giovanna Nicodano is professor of financial economics at the University of Turin, board member and research fellow at Collegio Carlo Alberto and Tilburg University(the Netherlands) and research associate of the European Corporate Governance Institute (Belgium). In Turin she co-founded the Centre for Research on Pension (CeRP). Her research deals with corporate finance, asset pricing and portfolio choice, and has been published in Journal of Finance, Annals of Finance, Review of Finance, Journal of Banking and Finance, European Economic Review, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics.

Riccardo Calcagno is asssociate professor of finance at EM Lyon Business School and research fellow at CCA. His research interests cover corporate finance, corporate governance and managerial compensation, housing wealth and consumption behaviour, commodity markets and microstructure. His work has been published in Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Mathematical Economics, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics.

Maria Cristina Rossi is associate professor of economics at the University of Turin. She is affiliate at Collegio Carlo Alberto and research fellow at CCA. She worked as an academic consultant for several international organizations among which the World Bank, the UNICEF, the Commission of the European Communities and the ILO. Specifically, she was part of the team led by OCR Macro for DG Health on the research “Study of the Problem of Consumer Indebtedness: Statistical Aspects” Contract n°: B5-1000/00/000197. Her main research areas are intertemporal saving and consumption choices, retirement decisions, economics of child labor, malnutrition. Her main publications appeared in Journal of Health Economics, Oxford Economic Papers and Oxford Bulletin of Economics.

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