I show how cyclical aggregate shocks can stimulate structural reallocation activities, which in turn amplify the effect of the shock. I emphasize the informational aspects related to restructuring activities and their potential interplay with aggregate shocks. Building on work by Caplin and...

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...

We derive a measure of technological change using firm-level panel data and controlling for imperfect competition, increasing returns and unobserved factor utilization. We show that the latter variable accounts for a relevant portion of the cyclicality of the Solow residual. Our key finding is...

The paper studies the transmission of monetary policy shocks in Italy, by means of a structural VAR, using a long data sample; focusing on a long sample period permits a comparison between the Italian evidence and the international literature and makes it possible to test the robustness of the...

We develop a model which accounts for the observed equity premium and average risk free rate, without implying counterfactually high risk aversion. The model also does well in accounting for business cycle phenomena.

We survey the existing work on the cross-country differences in the transmission of European monetary policy. We find that prior work, focusing on macroeconomic data, does not clearly answer the question posed in the title and offer some explanations for the ambiguity.

We study how aggregate volatility is influenced by the propagation of idiosyncratic shocks across firms through the network of ownership relations. We use detailed data on cross-holdings as well as the relevant balance sheet information for almost the entire universe of Italian limited liability...

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...