We study the distribution of housing wealth in Italy using data from a sample survey (the survey on household income and wealth) and from administrative records regarding real estate owners held by the Italian Department of the Treasury. Our results show that owners with either a low or a high...

We study the distribution of housing wealth in Italy using data from a sample survey (the survey on household income and wealth) and from administrative records regarding real estate owners held by the Italian Department of the Treasury. Our results show that owners with either a low or a high...

The paper uses questions included in the 2010 wave of the Bank of Italy�s Survey on Household Income and Wealth to investigate the role of family transmission of values. It presents three main empirical findings. First, the paper shows that a number of attitudes (generalized and...

This paper considers the problem of testing against stochastic trend and seasonality in the presence of structural breaks and unit roots at frequencies other than those directly under test, which we term unattended breaks and unattended unit roots respectively. We show that under unattended...

The paper considers tests of seasonal integration and cointegration for multivariate time series. The locally best invariant (LBI) test of the null hypothesis of a deterministic seasonal pattern against the alternative of seasonal integration is derived for a model with Gaussian i.i.d....

Large and growing international financial linkages between East and West have altered the nature of the stability risks faced by European banking systems, increasing susceptibility to contagion. This paper aims to identify potential risks of cross-border contagion using a sample of large Western...

The paper considers likelihood ratio (LR) tests of stationarity, common trends and cointegration for multivariate time series. As the distribution of these tests is not known, a bootstrap version is proposed via a state space representation. The bootstrap samples are obtained from the Kalman...

Tests of parameter instabilities are likely to have low power when change-points occur towards the end of the sample. This paper considers various modifications of existing tests and introduces new statistics designed to have high power in such circumstances. The properties of both Wald-type...

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....

The size and power properties of several tests of equal Mean Square Prediction Error (MSPE) and of Forecast Encompassing (FE) are evaluated, using Monte Carlo simulations, in the context of dynamic regressions. For nested models, the F-type test of forecast encompassing proposed by Clark and...