The available empirical evidence suggests that non-negligible differences in economic structures persist among euro area countries. Because of these asymmetries, an area-wide modelling approach is arguably less reliable, from a strictly statistical viewpoint, than a multi-country one. This paper...

Although the concept of core inflation is apparently well defined and intuitively appealing, its practical usefulness has often been questioned on at least two accounts: first, existing core inflation measures are by and large exclusively based on statistical criteria and thus lack a firm...

In this paper we assess whether monetary variables, which are observed with little delay, conveyed marginal information on the state of the Italian economy in the 1990s, taking as a benchmark the forecasting errors generated by the quarterly model used by the Bank of Italy. We follow two...

Building on the New Area Wide Model, we develop a 4-region macroeconomic model of the euro area and the world economy. The model (EAGLE, Euro Area and GLobal Economy model) is microfounded and designed for conducting quantitative policy analysis of macroeconomic interdependence across regions...

Whether a central bank should share with the public its views about the future evolution of short term interest rates is an unresolved issue. Disclosing this information might allow a more precise control of market expectations and a more effective achievement of the ultimate goals of the...

This paper has two objectives: the first is to jointly analyse monetary and fiscal policy with a structural VAR model, evaluate the dynamic impact of policy shocks on U.S. output and prices and the contributions of these two sources to fluctuations in these variables. The second objective is to...

We find evidence of a bank lending channel for the euro area operating via bank risk. Financial innovation and the new ways to transfer credit risk have tended to diminish the informational content of standard bank balance-sheet indicators. We show that bank risk conditions, as perceived by...

The paper examines micro data on Italian manufacturing firms� inventory behavior to test the Meltzer (1960) hypothesis according to which firms substitute trade credit for bank credit during periods of monetary tightening. It finds that their inventory investment is constrained by the...

We analyse the international transmission of monetary policy shocks with a focus on the effects of foreign liquidity on the euro area. We estimate two domestic structural VAR models for the euro area and then we introduce a global liquidity aggregate. The impulse responses show that a positive...

The flattening of the Phillips curve observed in the industrial countries has been attributed to globalisation, while the traditional explanation centres on monetary policy credibility. The empirical literature is not conclusive, since macroeconomic data are affected by substantial...