This paper introduces a framework to jointly account for the affordability of the periodic repayment of the housing debt (income constraint) and of the initial deposit (budget constraint). An application to 2006-2012 micro-data on Italian households indicates that the improvement in the ability...

Nowadays Italian borrowers can choose among a variety of mortgage contracts. Using a special Bank of Italy survey on 400 Italian banks over the period 2006-2013, we analyse the supply of ‘non-conventional' mortgages (loan-to-value ratio greater than 80 per cent, duration longer than 30 years...

A comprehensive analysis of price and cost competitiveness warrants an assessment of a range of alternately deflated nominal effective exchange rates. Here, we focus solely on the price-competitiveness indicator currently published by the Bank of Italy (Felettigh et al., 2015), which is based on...

Following the establishment of the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM), concerns about having a level playing field become more important due to the heterogeneity in bank taxation rules across Europe: measuring the tax burden can provide a first rough measure of the extent of heterogeneity across...

This paper uses ECB survey data to assess whether gender matters in the small firms' financial structure and access to credit. Firms owned or managed by women (female firms) use smaller amounts and less heterogeneous sources of external finance than their male counterparts. According to...

This paper documents the recent innovations to the Bank of Italy methodology underlying the estimation of price-competitiveness misalignments , first put forward in Giordano (2018); it also provides the most recent misalignment estimates for the euro area and for its four main economies, based...

Global Value Chains (GVCs) have been one of the main transmission mechanisms of 2009 the Great Trade Collapse. Our paper provides a description of the effects of the crisis from a perspective that is both country-comparative (Germany and Italy) and on firm level. Two are the main conclusions: i)...

In this paper I present evidence about the importance of demand for services in the development of the service sector. By comparing developments in demand for services in Italy, France, Germany and the US, I show that the contribution of final demand by European households to growth in output is...

This paper provides new Bank of Italy indicators of price competitiveness for 62 countries. We refreshed the approach adopted by the Bank in the 1990s but later discontinued in 2005 due to the cumbersome statistical requirements in order to accommodate the significant extension of the original...

This paper evaluates the extent of internationalisation of production between 1995 and 2006 for Italy and Germany. The analysis is based on a large set of indicators of international outsourcing including a new one, the direct and indirect import content of production, which also takes into...