This paper uses a Factor Augmented Vector Autoregressive model to assess the macroeconomic impact of the euro-area sovereign debt crisis and the effectiveness of the European Central Bank's conventional monetary policy. First, our results show that in the countries most affected by the crisis,...

Policy reforms aimed at boosting long-run growth often have side effects – positive or negative – on an economy’s vulnerability to shocks and their propagation. Macroeconomic shocks as severe and protracted as those since 2007 warrant a reconsideration of the role growth-promoting policies...

Policy reforms aimed at boosting long-run growth often have side effects – positive or negative – on an economy’s vulnerability to shocks and their propagation. Macroeconomic shocks as severe and protracted as those since 2007 warrant a reconsideration of the role growth-promoting policies...

The decline in macroeconomic volatility from the 1980s to the onset of the Great Recession did not, in general, translate into more microeconomic stability. While microeconomic volatility can reflect growth-generating processes, such as creative destruction and re-allocation of resources,...

The crisis revealed the need for a strategic review of the existing social protection system in Estonia. Extreme income fluctuations on one side and low social benefits on the other side exposed fragile groups in the population to a significant poverty risk. The government has recently...

The ability of a two-sector model to quantify the contribution of the housing market to business fluctuations is investigated using U.S. data and Bayesian methods. The estimated model, which contains nominal and real rigidities and collateral constraints, displays the following features: first,...

Based on a structural VAR and a dynamic general equilibrium model, we provide evidence of the changes in the monetary transmission mechanism (MTM) in the European Monetary Union after the adoption of the common currency in 1999. The estimation of a Bayesian VAR over the periods before and after...

We exploit the new historical national accounts data for Italy over the period 1861-2010, built by Banca d'Italia and Istat, with the collaboration of the University of Rome "Tor Vergata". In the first part of the paper, a thorough study of the new data's statistical properties is presented...