Since it became a united country, Italy was looked at with keen eyes by foreign economists, economic historians and policy makers. They wanted to see whether it would be possible for the economy of a country which had in the XVII and XVIII century regressed to the role of agricultural raw...

A great deal of new quantitative research has been produced over the last three decades which has radically changed the received interpretation of Italian economic development. Against this backdrop, the Bank of Italy, Istat and the University of Rome "Tor Vergata", together with academics from...

The research presented here is part of a wider project of revision of historical national accounts in Italy between 1891 and 1970. The reconstruction for 1951-1970 relies on a previous estimate of inter-sectoral (input-output) matrix for 1951 and on a new estimate of inter-sectoral matrix for...

Building on a new dataset on Italian banks and other financial institutions from 1861 to 2011, the novelty of this paper is to examine the patterns of the main items of bank's balance sheets, such as deposits, capital and reserves, bonds issued, bonds held in portfolio, and loans for a period of...

We exploit the new historical national accounts data for Italy over the period 1861-2010, built by Banca d'Italia and Istat, with the collaboration of the University of Rome "Tor Vergata". In the first part of the paper, a thorough study of the new data's statistical properties is presented...

In a stylised framework of fiscal policy determination that considers both structural targets and cyclical factors, we find significant cyclical asymmetry in the behaviour of fiscal variables in a sample of fourteen EU countries from 1970 to 2004, with budgetary balances (both overall and...

The Stability and Growth Pact sets a medium-term target for fiscal policy of a budgetary position "close to balance of in surplus". This addition to the deficit rule defined by the Maastricht Treaty has been interpreted as an attempt to reconcile the objective of sound public finances with the...

In this paper we present a stylised framework of fiscal policy determination that considers both structural targets and cyclical factors. Applying this framework to a sample of 16 OECD countries, we find evidence of significant asymmetry in the reaction of fiscal policy to positive and negative...

The Stability and Growth Pact sets a medium-term target for fiscal policy of a budgetary position 'close to balance or in surplus'. This addition to the deficit rule defined by the Maastricht Treaty has been interpreted as an attempt to reconciliate the objective of sound public finances with...

We examine the public debt management problem with respect to the maturity mix of new issues in a mean-variance framework. After identifying the main determinants of the long-run target (strategy), we focus on which interest rate conditions allow for a temporary deviation (tactics). The study is...