Essays in Empirical Microeconomics and Finance

The present thesis is divided in three chapters. The first focuses on Education Economics. The second and the third on Household Finance. The following paragraphs describe the contents of each chapter in more detail. The first essay compares and contrasts aggregate and individual level analyses to investigate the relationship between economic fluctuations and tertiary education enrollments in Italy. It shows that aggregate enrollments follow a procyclical pattern. Consistently, it finds that Italian young individuals living with their parents implement a procyclical enrollment decision. The paper tries to reconcile the empirical evidence with theoretical predictions, and investigates a number of different channels. It proposes a rather novel, nevertheless theory consistent interpretation for the evidence found. The paper argues that Italian individuals living with their parents implement a procyclical behaviour because they can't access credit to finance their education. It supports this statement with consistent empirical evidence. The second essay studies whether labour income volatility crowds out investment in risky assets in Italian households. Justified by the literature on limited participation, the paper makes use of reduced form estimations to show that Italian households hedge their labour income risk on the risky assets market. It contributes by proposing a novel measure of labour income volatility, ground on the literature on labour income dynamics. On a methodological perspective, the paper adds to the literature by estimating reduced form models using a recent estimation technique, never implemented before in this branch of research. It shows that the new methodology overcomes some of the limitations of the techniques previously applied in the literature. The third essay, co-authored with Professors Sule Alan and Eric Smith, focuses on the subprime credit market in the United Kingdom. Making use of a unique database centered on a randomized trial experiment, the paper identifies the causal effect of an increase in the cost of credit on individual credit demand and default probability.