This paper presents ideas and methods underlying the construction of an indicator that tracks the euro area GDP growth, but, unlike GDP growth, (i) is updated monthly and almost in real time; (ii) is free from hort-run dynamics. Removal of short-run dynamics from a time series, to isolate the...

Although the concept of core inflation is apparently well defined and intuitively appealing, its practical usefulness has often been questioned on at least two accounts: first, existing core inflation measures are by and large exclusively based on statistical criteria and thus lack a firm...

This paper investigates the microeconomic behaviour of consumer prices in Italy using the individual price records underlying the Italian CPI dataset collected by Istat. We discuss how to analyse price stickiness using such a detailed database and compute a quantitative measure of the...

This study analyses Italy�s system for supporting internationalization, i.e. the set of public institutions and policies for promoting Italian businesses and products abroad. These policies are designed to overcome the barriers to operation in foreign markets, which may be distant in terms...

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...

This paper is the result of the Bank of Italy-CEPR project to construct a monthly coincident indicator of the business cycle of the euro area. The index is estimated on the basis of a harmonized data set of monthly statistics of the euro area (951 series) which we constructed from a variety of...

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...

This paper investigates the business cycle properties of the euro area and computes a coincident and a leading indicator of economic activity. We accomplish this by applying the newly introduced generalized factor model to a properly constructed and harmonized data set of short term statistics...