There is a broad consensus that the quality of the political system and its institutionsare fundamental for a country’s prosperity. The paper focuses on political events inItaly over the past 35 years and asks whether the adoption of the euro in 1999 hashelped insulate Italy’s financial...

We propose a numerical test of the non-parametric conditions for additive separability between consumption and real money balances, building on Varian (1983). If additive separability is rejected, then real balances enter into the theoretical IS curve. We test whether or not monetary assets and...

A remarkable development seen in recent years is the pronounced decline in euro area M1 velocity vis--vis a moderate decline in short-term interest rates, which represent the most natural opportunity cost for M1, suggesting an increase in the interest rate elasticity of M1 demand. In fact,...

This paper presents a dynamic general equilibrium model with sticky prices, in which "inside" money, made out of commercial banks’ liabilities, plays an active, structural role role. It is shown that, in such a model, an inside money shock has a well-defined meaning. A calibrated version of...

Periods of economic and financial stress traditionally give rise to profound changes in economic theory and in the way policy decisions are taken. Motivated by the recent interest in renewing macroeconomics after the global financial crisis, we collected the views of senior central bank staff in...

This paper evaluates the impact of the rise of large emerging manufacturing exporters such as China and India on economic growth in advanced countries. After illustrating the possible theoretical channels, I estimate a growth regression based on 3-year average data augmented with...

This paper takes a close look at the 'behavioural finance' explanations of the equity premium puzzle, namely myopic loss aversion (Benartzi and Thaler, 1995) and disappointment aversion (Ang, Bekaert and Liu, 2000). The paper proposes a simple specification of loss and disappointment aversion...

This paper endeavours to provide a comprehensive analysis of the nature and the possible importance of “global excess liquidity”, a concept which has attracted considerable attention in recent years. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we present some conceptual discussion on...

This paper deals with the optimal allocation of risks for an agent whose preferences may be represented with prospect theory (Tversky and Kahneman, 1992). A simple setting is considered with n identically distributed and symmetric sources of risk. Under expected utility, equal diversification of...

This paper sets out to investigate the role of additive uncertainty under plausible non-standard central bank loss functions over future inflation. Building on a substantial body of evidence in the economic psychology literature, this paper postulates (i) period-by-period loss functions that are...