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Archive » November 2023 » Covid-19 and financial behaviour of investors in Italy

Covid-19 and financial behaviour of investors in Italy

Luca Piras, Marco Mandas
November 2023 - n. 11
Keywords: Covid-19, pandemia, comportamento degli investitori, propensione al rischio, asset allocation
Jel codes: A20, I15, I18, G32

What impact had Covid-19 on the risk appetite of Italian savers? How investors reacted to the most significant health emergency of the last hundred years? What choices have characterized their behavior? We started by analyzing investment data from 1999 to 2022, published by Eurostat, and the stocks of the different financial instruments including deposits, debt securities, loans and shares. We also study behaviour at the micro level, starting from the Bank of Italy survey on the budgets of Italian households. It emerges that the aggregate financial wealth in Italy has increased during the pandemic, but its composition shows unexpected trends: the observed dynamics do not seem to be explainable considering a possible effect of the pandemic on risk appetite.

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