Since 2013 the inflation rate in the euro area has fallen steadily, reaching all-time lows at the end of 2014. Market-based measures of inflation expectations (such as inflation swaps) have also declined to extremely low levels, which suggests increasing concern about the credibility of the ECB...

In the case of the consumer price index the importance of a seasonally adjusted measure lies in the possibility of promptly identifying turning points in inflation. The focus of this paper is the so-called "cost-of-living" index, the most used measure of Italian inflation. Our aim is to identify...

We exploit the new historical national accounts data for Italy over the period 1861-2010, built by Banca d'Italia and Istat, with the collaboration of the University of Rome "Tor Vergata". In the first part of the paper, a thorough study of the new data's statistical properties is presented...

We present a new indicator of house prices in Italy, with more extensive geographical and time coverage. The new indicator now makes it possible to analyze medium- and long-term trends with satisfactory representation of the Italian housing market. It also allows for timely updating, for prompt...

This paper proposes an index of core inflation for the euro area which exploits information from a large panel of time series on disaggregated prices, industrial production, labor market indicators, financial and monetary variables. The index is the result of a smoothing operation at both the...

In this paper we investigate the main features of the Italian financial cycle, extracted by means of a structural trend-cycle decomposition of the credit-to-GDP ratio, using annual observations from 1861 to 2011. In order to draw conclusions based on solid historical data, we provide a thorough...

In this paper we develop a mixed frequency dynamic factor model featuring stochastic shifts in the volatility of both the latent common factor and the idiosyncratic components. We take a Bayesian perspective and derive a Gibbs sampler to obtain the posterior density of the model parameters. This...

The recent empirical evidence documenting the presence of asymmetries in business cycles represents a challenge for the standard equilibrium models of real business cycle. These models successfully explain most first and second moments of the actual time series, but cannot replicate non-linear...

This work attempts to quantify the size of the adjustment of the United States external imbalance which can arise from a depreciation of the dollar, an adjustment of the Government�s budget in the United States and an acceleration of the technological process in other main advanced...

This paper studies the transmission of monetary policy shocks from the US to the euro-area using a two-country structural VAR with no exogeneity assumption. The analysis reveals the following results. First, in response to an unexpected increase in the Federal funds rate, the euro immediately...