This paper briefly reviews the literature on fiscal multipliers and then presents results for the Italian economy obtained by simulating a dynamic general equilibrium model that allows for the possibility (a) that the zero lower bound may be binding and (b) that the initial public debt-to-GDP...

We study empirically the distributional implications of a non-standard monetary policy expansion, considering the measures implemented by the Eurosystem in 2011-2012 and exploiting a rich micro dataset on Italian households' income and wealth, in order to take contemporaneously into account a...

Using micro price data underlying the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices in France, Germany and Italy, we estimate relative price trends over the product life cycle and show that minimizing price and mark-up distortions in the presence of these trends requires targeting a significantly positive...

We contribute to the debate on how to assess the size of the underground or shadow economy with a reinterpretation of the traditional Currency Demand Approach (CDA) à la Tanzi. We introduce three main innovations. First, we take as dependent variable in the money demand equation a direct...

This paper estimates a consumption function for Italy. In addition to permanent income, housing wealth, the interest rate on household loans and an index of credit conditions, our model introduces household net worth split into liquid and illiquid assets. The consumption dynamics are examined by...

The work analyses the characteristics of supply in the Italian credit market with a focus on the years 2009-2014. By using a new survey, I find that approximately 40 percent of the decline in business lending originates in the tightening of bank credit standards, with a significant decrease in...

Payment systems track economic transactions and therefore could be considered important indicators of economic activity. This paper describes the available monthly data on the retail settlement system for Italy and selects some of them for short-term forecasting. Using a mixed frequency factor...

This paper evaluates the characteristics of a Point in Time (PiT) rating approach for the estimation of firms' credit risk in terms of procyclicality. To this end I first estimate a logit model for the probability default (PD) of a set of Italian non-financial firms during the period 2006-2012,...

A recent strand of literature has investigated the granular sources of the business cycle, i.e. to what extent firm-level dynamics have an impact on aggregate fluctuations. From a conceptual point of view, in the presence of fat-tailed firm-size distributions, shocks to large firms may not...

In this paper we study how the Great Recession affected university students in terms of performance, with a focus on the drop-out probability. To do so, we use individual-level data on a representative sample of university students in Italy in 2007 and 2011. We measure the severity of the...