This paper analyses the business cycle properties of 183 time series relevant to the Italian economy, including real, monetary and international variables. We propose new monthly coincident and leading composite indicators for the Italian business cycle; the leading indicator anticipates the...

In the 2008-09 school year the Bank of Italy and the Italian Ministry of Education started an experimental program to incorporate financial education into school curricula. This paper describes the experience since then. According to the program, teachers receive training from the Bank on...

We investigate the role of information spillovers (IS) in determining firms' labor adjustments. We test the proposition that information on relevant state variables spills over through one firm's decision th those of other firms, assuming that spillovers matter only among frims that are both...

In an economy where entrepreneurs with unequal "abilities" face alternative investment projects, which differ in degree of risk and productivity, we analyse the Nash equilibrium contracts arising from a banks-borrowers game in the context of asymmetric information. We show that, for a particular...