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In this paper, we provide new evidence on whether individuals differ in their level of trust depending on their exposure to unexpected terrorist attacks during crucial life phases. In line with the well-grounded psychological theories on the formation of human beliefs, attitudes, and values, we find that exposure to traumatic and violent events in the two essential stages of human development – adolescence and early adulthood – reduces trust in other people. The formed values tend to be persistent over time, and the results are robust to several checks.

This paper examines the interaction between altruism towards offspring and precautionary savings. It investigates whether increased uncertainty in children labor income fosters savings of parents. We first construct a two-periods and two-generations model, to underline which are the mechanisms behind the intergenerational precautionary motive for savings. Second, we exploit two micro datasets to test the main theoretical implications. Parents’ consumption turns out to respond to the offspring’s income risk. This result is robust to the presence of family fixed effects and to many alternative empirical specifications.

in this paper we exploit pension reform-induced changes in retirement eligibility requirements to assess the role of grandparental child care availability in the employment of women who have children under 15. We focus on Italy for two reasons: first, it has low rates of female employment and little formal child care provision and, second, it has undergone several pension reforms in a relatively short time span. Our analysis shows that, among the women studied, those whose own mothers are retirement eligible have a 13 percent higher probability of being employed than those whose mothers are ineligible. The pension eligibility of maternal grandfathers and paternal grandparents, however, has no significant effect on the women's employment probability. We also demonstrate that the eligibility of maternal grandmothers mainly captures the effect of their availability for child care. Hence, pension reforms, by potentially robbing households of an important source of flexible, low-cost child care, could have unintended negative consequences for the employment rates of women with children.