We study firms� incentives to acquire costly information in booms and recessions to understand the role of endogenous information in explaining business cycles. We find that when the economy has been in a recession in the previous period, and firms enter the current period with a...

We investigate the role of information spillovers (IS) in determining firms' labor adjustments. We test the proposition that information on relevant state variables spills over through one firm's decision th those of other firms, assuming that spillovers matter only among frims that are both...

We present a new indicator of house prices in Italy, with more extensive geographical and time coverage. The new indicator now makes it possible to analyze medium- and long-term trends with satisfactory representation of the Italian housing market. It also allows for timely updating, for prompt...

In this paper we develop a mixed frequency dynamic factor model featuring stochastic shifts in the volatility of both the latent common factor and the idiosyncratic components. We take a Bayesian perspective and derive a Gibbs sampler to obtain the posterior density of the model parameters. This...

This paper compares the return to pre-crisis levels and the long-term performance of exports in the main Italian regions compared with some European regions with a similar production structure. The results show that the intensity and timing of recovery in the cyclical component of exports were...

Supervisors and policy makers pay increasing attention to the possible procyclical nature of banks� behaviour. Indeed, to guarantee macro and financial stability, it is important to understand whether, and to what extent, banks are affected by the macroeconomy and second round effects...

This paper investigates the markup of price over marginal cost in Italian manufacturing branches. The approach used is an extension of Hall�s model that addresses some measurement shortcomings and theoretical limitations that may affect this class of model. The hypothesis of perfect...

This paper is the result of the Bank of Italy-CEPR project to construct a monthly coincident indicator of the business cycle of the euro area. The index is estimated on the basis of a harmonized data set of monthly statistics of the euro area (951 series) which we constructed from a variety of...