A standard result of optimal debt management models is that in a world of complete markets, where policymakers can make credible announcements, the maturity structure of government debt is totally irrelevant. This paper investigates the role of debt maturity in a very simple context in which...

The role of movements in real rates in explaining the relationship between long and short-term interest rates is explored using a model of optimal government debt management.

Exploiting the analogy with the private provision of a public good, this paper studies debt restructuring with an arbitrary number of creditors using mechanism design.

In this paper we assess the impact of unexpected shocks to real interest rates and GDP on government budgets for nine European Union countries. Shocks are estimated as onestep-ahead forecast errors arising from a recursive bivariate VAR model. To assess the impact on the budgets we use available...

We examine the impact of four factors on the fiscal policies of the euro-area countries over the last two decades: the state of public finances, the European fiscal rules, cyclical conditions and general elections. We rely on information actually available to policy-makers at the time of...

Whether discretionary fiscal policies in industrialized countries act counter- or pro-cyclically and whether their reaction is symmetric or asymmetric over the cycle are still largely unsettled questions. This uncertainty remains even when attention is restricted to euro-area countries, where...

The problems of Italy�s education system mostly stem from its modus operandi and interactions with the expectations of families and students. The recent signs of improvement in Italian students� proficiency, plausibly reflecting greater emphasis on rigour, could be reinforced by making...

This paper studies the impact of citizens� human capital on the characteristics of elected politicians in democratic elections for the post of mayor. By using a change in the rules for Italian mayoral elections and a difference-in-differences estimator, I find that cities endowed with a...

This work verifies the consistency of the results of two surveys of Italian students' proficiency: the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Italy's national assessment (Invalsi), both conducted in 2012. Focusing especially on the common part of the reference student...

This paper estimates the impact of university teachers on their students� academic achievement and labor market outcomes using administrative data from Bocconi University matched with Italian tax records. The estimation exploits the random allocation of students to teachers in a fixed...