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...

During the recent global recession both the export-oriented northern Italian regions and those in the far less open South experienced a sharp decline in economic activity. One of the possible explanations is the existence of strong domestic linkages propagating foreign demand shocks from North...

We study the effects of the world economic crisis which began in 2007 on the Italian productive system. National accounts data are supplemented with information gathered in spring 2009 from the Bank of Italy�s survey on industrial and service firms, and from interviews with about 70 of...

This paper examines the problem of relaxing the exclusion restriction for the evaluation of causal effects in randomized experiments with imperfect compliance. Exclusion restriction is a relevant assumption for identifying causal effects by the nonparametric instrumental variables technique, in...

In this paper we focus on tenant rents in Italy and compare results from several methods for the rent dynamic estimation. We first document the sources of data available and then introduce quality-adjusted techniques, which enable us to separate the price variation due to qualitative changes in...

We consider a difference-in-differences setting with a continuous outcome, such as wages or expenditure. The standard practice is to take the logarithm of the outcome and then interpret the results as an approximation of the multiplicative treatment effect on the original outcome. We argue that...

This paper studies the identification and estimation of treatment response with heterogeneous spillovers in a network model. We generalize the standard linear-in-means model to allow for multiple groups with between and within-group interactions. We provide a set of identification conditions of...