We consider an economy in which the oil costs, industrial production, and other macroeconomic variables fluctuate in response to fundamental domestic and external demand and supply shocks. We estimate the effects of these structural shocks on US monthly data for the 1973.1-2007.12 period using...

This paper builds a baseline two-country model of real and monetary transmission in the presence of optimal international price discrimination by firms. Distributing traded goods to consumers requires nontradables, intensive in local labor. Because of distributive trade the price elasticity of...

We look at business survey data on Italian internationalized firms’ characteristics and performances since the outbreak of the 2008 crisis until 2012. Among Italian firms with 20 employees or more, an increasing share (from 7.1 to 13.2% between 2006 and 2011) owns a foreign productive unit....

This paper asks whether and why advanced countries differ in their ability to export to China and India. We exploit a newly collected, comparable cross-country survey of 15,000 European manufacturing firms (EFIGE). The dataset contains information on firms� international activities and...

The unsatisfactory performance of Italian export volumes in the last decade has been attributed to three factors; the product specialization still centered around traditional sectors, the small firm size and the exceptional rise in export unit values. This paper analyzes the latter with the aim...

In the past decade changes in oil prices have played a significant role in shaping inflation dynamics in the US and in the euro area, largely through their direct effect on fuels prices, reviving the controversy over whether the prices of petroleum products respond more promptly to positive than...

Business investment is a very important variable for short- and medium-term economic analysis, but it is volatile and difficult to predict. Qualitative business survey data are widely used to provide indicators of economic activity ahead of the publication of official data. Traditional...

The aim of the paper is to estimate a reliable quarterly time-series of potential output for the Italian economy, exploiting four alternative approaches: a Bayesian unobserved component method, a univariate time-varying autoregressive model, a production function approach and a structural VAR....

Two main hypotheses are usually put forward to explain the productivity advantages of larger cities: agglomeration economies and firm selection. Combes et al. (2012) propose an empirical approach to disentangle these two effects and fail to find any impact of selection on local productivity...

This paper proposes the use of Bayesian model averaging (BMA) as a tool to select the predictors' set for bridge models. BMA is a computationally feasible method that allows us to explore the model space even in the presence of a large set of candidate predictors. We test the performance of BMA...