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...

A generalization of the endogenous threshold model is developed by extending this class to a multivariate framework and to cases where the feedback acts at multiple lags. The feedback is specified, following Beaudry and Koop, by a variable which measures the depth of recessions. We give...

The paper compares the Argentine specialization model with that of the other major Latin American countries. Given the lack of production data at disaggregate level, we rely on trade flow information from the WTA Statistics Canada database (3-digit SITC classification), available for most Latin...

The paper analyses the most recent evolution of the trade specialisation pattern in the 10 new EU Member States. Relying on the empirical approach of the Markov transition matrices it analyses both the changes in the external shape of the distribution of comparative advantages and the...

A generalization of the endogenous threshold model is developed by extending this class to multivariate framework and to cases where the feedback acts at multiple lags. The feedback is specified, following Beaudry and Koop, by a variable which measures the depth of recessions. We give conditions...

In an economy where entrepreneurs with unequal "abilities" face alternative investment projects, which differ in degree of risk and productivity, we analyse the Nash equilibrium contracts arising from a banks-borrowers game in the context of asymmetric information. We show that, for a particular...

Profit share in Italy has been growing between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, remaining stable at historically high levels since than. After dropping in the first half of the 1970s, owing to an unprecedented rapid rise in wages, profit share started to recover. The rise during the 1980s...

The paper assesses the vulnerability of China to external shocks via the indirect negative effect of a slow-down in exports on domestic demand for investment. In the last decade China has increased its dependence on external demand, particularly from the advanced countries; at the same time it...

We present a comparable set of results on the monetary transmission channels on firm investment for the four largest countries of the euro area (Germany, France, Italy and Spain). With particularly rich micro datasets for each country containing over 215,000 observations from 1985 to 1999, we...