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...

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...

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...

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 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...

Particularly in the 1990s economists in America have been surprised by how good or how lucky has been our macro performance compared to our peers abroad. We pinch ourselves and ask: "What went right?" And, by implication, authorities in Europe must be looking in their mirror and wondering:...

We adopt a general equilibrium approach in order to measure the effects of recent immigration on the Western German labor market, looking at both wage and employment effects. Using the Regional File of the IAB Employment Subsample for the period 1987- 2001, we find that the substantial...

A generalization of the endogenous threshold model is developed by extending this class to a multivariate framework and to cases where the feedback acts at multiple lags. The feedback is specified, following Beaudry and Koop, by a variable which measures the depth of recessions. We give...

Profit share in Italy has been growing between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, remaining stable at historically high levels since than. After dropping in the first half of the 1970s, owing to an unprecedented rapid rise in wages, profit share started to recover. The rise during the 1980s...

The fall in employment and the increase in unemployment rates in Italy in 2009 were fairly modest, given the sharp drop in GDP and compared with the recession of the early 1990s. This work shows that these data should be interpreted with caution, however. Firstly, employment trends as measured...