The revised Basel Capital Accord requires banks to meet a capital requirement for operational risk as part of an overall risk-based capital framework. Three distinct options for calculating operational risk charges are proposed (Basic Approach, Standardised Approach, Advanced Measurement...

The paper argues that the traditional difficulty encountered in finding evidence on the effects of credit availability on economic activity depends on the fact that these effects are powerful but rare and vary with the cycle. The global financial crisis offers an opportunity to test this...

This paper provides a systematic empirical analysis of the role of the housing market in the macroeconomy in the U.S. and the euro area. First, it establishes some stylised facts concerning key variables in the housing market on the two sides of the Atlantic, such as real house prices,...

Adopting a system approach, the paper evaluates results of empirical research on money demand recently obtained at the Bank of Italy in a single equation context.

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...

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...

This paper considers the problem of testing for the presence of stochastic trends in multivariate time series with structural breaks. The breakpoints are assumed to be known. The testing framework is the multivariate Locally Best Invariant test and the common trend test of Nyblom and Harvey...

We assess the impact of low-skilled immigration on capital intensity. We first present a model characterized by frictions in the labor market and firms' asymmetric information on workers' skills and show that firms can react to the immigration-induced reduction of their workforce's skill level...

In an economy where entrepreneurs with unequal "abilities" face alternative investment projects, which differ in degree of risk and productivity, we analyse the Nash equilibrium contracts arising from a banks-borrowers game in the context of asymmetric information. We show that, for a particular...

We present a comparable set of results on the monetary transmission channels on firm investment for the four largest countries of the euro area (Germany, France, Italy and Spain). With particularly rich micro datasets for each country containing over 215,000 observations from 1985 to 1999, we...