This paper develops an early warning system for sovereign debt crises, broadly defined as episodes of outright default, failure of a country to be current on external obligations and substantial access to IMF resources. It estimates a multinomial logit model that makes it possible to...

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...

This paper presents the new yearly series of the value-added of services for Italy, from 1861 to 1951, at current prices. For each sector, after discussing sources and methodology, the results are compared with the early Istat (1957) series. By looking at the production value of specific...

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...

In this paper we investigate the main features of the Italian financial cycle, extracted by means of a structural trend-cycle decomposition of the credit-to-GDP ratio, using annual observations from 1861 to 2011. In order to draw conclusions based on solid historical data, we provide a thorough...

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...

This paper analyses aggregate household wealth in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, the UK and the US. Building on a new data set for the time span 1980-2011, we discuss the trends in household financial assets in the last thirty years, the reasons for differences across countries,...

The supply chain of the real estate sector accounts for one fifth of Italian GDP; its importance for the banking system is even greater: lending to this sector accounts for more than one third of total loans to the private sector. The crisis in the construction and real estate sector started...