The European Union�s VAT system has become vulnerable to organised fraud schemes. In recent years, these schemes, undergoing a change in structure, have affected services and imports of goods from third countries and may also have shifted trade in goods among EU countries. Within the EU-27,...

A standard result of optimal debt management models is that in a world of complete markets, where policymakers can make credible announcements, the maturity structure of government debt is totally irrelevant. This paper investigates the role of debt maturity in a very simple context in which...

This paper investigates the relationship between fiscal contractions, permanent improvements in public finances and short-run economic performance.

The aim of the paper is to characterize the optimal child care policies (subsidies and state provision), assuming that child care provision affects the child�s future abilities. Public intervention is needed since two sources of economic inefficiency are contemporaneously influential:...

This paper summarizes the results attained by the Eurosystem in harmonizing the statistics used for the conduct of monetary policy. Since the creation of the euro area, in January 1999, significant progress has been made in the harmonization of data on banks’ balance sheets, central banks and...

In this paper we test for the potential bias in the estimated contribution of a supply restriction on lending to enterprises, as captured by the assessment of credit standards provided by the banks participating in the Eurosystem Bank Lending Survey (BLS banks). For Italy, we combine the...

After August 2007 the plumbing system that supplied banks with wholesale funding, the interbank market, failed because toxic assets obstructed the pipes. Banks were forced to squeeze liquidity in a �lemons market� or to ask for liquidity �on tap� from central banks. This...

The recent financial crisis has revived the debate on deposit insurance. Public awareness of its existence is essential in order to prevent a bank run. Analysing the results of three questions on this topic introduced in the last Survey on Household Income and Wealth, this paper investigates...

The recent economic and financial crisis has drawn attention to how mutual guarantee institutions (MGIs) facilitate small and medium enterprises in accessing bank financing. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we describe the structural features of the Italian market for mutual guarantees...

This paper tests the role of different banks� liquidity funding structures in explaining the bank failures that occurred in the United States between 2007 and 2009. The results highlight that funding is indeed a significant factor in explaining banks� probability of default. By...