In this paper I study two methods often used in public procurement to deal with the risk that the winning bidder may default on his bid: augmenting the standard first price auction with an ex-post verification of the responsiveness of the bids and using an average bid auction. I show that when...

Despite successive reforms, public procurement in Italy is still highly fragmented and vulnerable to collusion, corruption and ex-post renegotiation. Other defects are found in the planning stages of the works. These problems are due in part to the regulations on the awarding of public works...

The paper discusses the economic problem and the institutional features underlying the Nimby syndrome, and illustrates preliminary empirical evidence for Italy. It argues that siting procedures taking local preferences into account should be preferred when the heterogeneity in preferences across...

This paper puts forward a comprehensive framework to model medium-to-long term public debt refinancing strategies. Essentially the framework has two main building blocks. First, a large number of strategies are generated so as to determine a wide range of potential financing plans, regardless of...

Rationalizability is a widely accepted solution concept in the study of strategic form game with complete information and is fully characterized in terms of assumptions on the rationality of the players and common certainty of rationality. Battigalli and Siniscalchi extend rationalizability and...

This paper analyzes the operation of the Eurosystem�s public and private assets purchases programmes for monetary policy purposes, quantifying the potential effect on the Italian economy. First we give an exhaustive account of the main transmission channels by which the purchases can be...

This publication collects the papers presented at the workshop entitled "The sovereign debt crisis and the euro area", held at the Bank of Italy in Rome on 15 February 2013. In recent years the Economic Research and International Relations Area of the Bank of Italy has conducted several analyses...

We explain why the macroeconomic effects of shocks to inflation of the same size, but opposite sign, are not necessarily symmetric. All in all, the costs of deflation and disinflation tend to exceed those of inflation due to the presence of constraints in the economy, namely the zero lower bound...

In this paper we test for the potential bias in the estimated contribution of a supply restriction on lending to enterprises, as captured by the assessment of credit standards provided by the banks participating in the Eurosystem Bank Lending Survey (BLS banks). For Italy, we combine the...

This paper builds a dynamic model of the information flow between partially informed financial institutions and a public agency. The financial institutions decide how to allocate their portfolio between a risk-free technology with a known payoff and a risky technology whose payoff is unknown....