From a financial standpoint, the mechanics of the carry trade has been recently examined in Brunnermeier et al. (2009). They showed that shocks to interest rate differentials lead to carry trade activity and to significant reactions in the bilateral exchange rates vis-a-vis the US dollar that...

This paper investigates the relationship between futures prices and financial investments in derivatives of the main agricultural commodities. We first provide a broad picture of how these markets function and how they have evolved, showing that traders who deal mostly in commodity index...

This paper evaluates the use of risk-neutral probability density functions implied in 3-month interest-rate futures options to assess market perceptions regarding future monetary policy moves options allow the information content implied in simpler derivatives to be extended by providing...

This paper explores the implications of systemic risk in Credit Structured Finance (CSF). Risk measurement issues loomed large during the 2007-08 financial crisis, as the massive, unprecedented number of downgrades of AAA senior bond tranches inflicted severe losses on banks, calling into...

We perform an event study to investigate the efficiency of the Chinese stock market. We study the reaction of stock returns and trading volumes to the 2005-2006 structural reform which allowed the transformation of non-tradable shares (NTS) into tradable shares (TS) through payment of a...

The book brings together a series of research papers presented at a workshop on "The trends of Italy's international tourism", held at the Bank of Italy in Rome on 22 June 2012, on occasion of the release, on Bank of Italy's website, of microdata from the Survey on international tourism in...

What is the relationship between real exchange rate misalignments and economic growth? And what effect, if any, did undervaluations or overvaluations of the lira/euro have on Italy's growth? We address these questions by presenting, first, three main facts: (i) there is a positive relationship...

This paper examines the product specialisation of Italian exports over the period 1985-2001 to identify the roots of Italy�s sluggish export performance with respect to world trade in the second half of the 1990s. In particular, the analysis focuses on the role of product specialisation in...

This paper compares main European countries and the euro area specialization patterns. The analysis, that covers the period 1988-1997 and is based on a detailed sectoral breakdown, provides evidence to assess the degree of structural differences and convergence among European countries, which...

We introduce a novel methodology to measure the relative TFP of the tradeable sector across countries, based on the relationship between trade and TFP in the model of Eaton and Kortum (2002). The logic of our approach is to measure TFP not from its "primitive" (the production function) but from...