We evaluate the macroeconomic effects of shocks specific to the oil market, which mainly reflect fluctuations in precautionary demand for oil driven by uncertainty about future supplies. A two-stage identification procedure is used. First, daily changes in the futures-spot spread proxy for...

The objective of the paper is to adjust for the bias due to unit non-response and measurement error in survey estimates of total household financial wealth. Sample surveys are a useful source of information on household wealth. Yet, survey estimates are affected by non-sampling errors. In...

Compared with other European countries, the Italian labour market stands out for the low level of both female participation and fertility. In this paper we focus on the employment patterns of Italian mothers around the time of childbirth. Our hypothesis is that the difficulties involved in...

This paper analyzes the macroeconomic effects on the U.S. economy of news about oil supply by estimating a VAR. Information contained in daily quotations of oil futures contracts is exploited to estimate the dynamic path of oil prices following a shock. Hence, differently from the VAR literature...

Survey data attract considerable interest as timely and reliable series for assessing the state of the economy. We investigate the relationship between the manufacturing PMI and the Index of Industrial Production (IPI) for Italy, with a special focus on the effects of the latest crisis. The...

In this paper we present a coincident indicator for the Italian economy, Ita-coin. We construct a multivariate filter based on a broad information set, whose dimension is reduced by the Generalized Dynamic Factor Model (GDFM) approach proposed by Forni et al. (2002). A regression based on the...

We introduce a two-country no-arbitrage term-structure model to analyse the joint dynamics of bond yields, macroeconomic variables, and the exchange rate. The model allows to understand how exogenous shocks to the exchange rate affect the yield curves, how bond yields co-move in different...

We study the dynamics of risk premiums on the German bond market, employing no-arbitrage term-structure models with both observable and unobservable state variables, recently popularized by Ang and Piazzesi (2003). We conduct a specification analisys based on a new canonical representation for...