The debate in Italy on the recent disappointing performance of GDP growth has focused on the increasing competitive pressure exerted by firms located in the developing countries and specialized in key product sectors of Italian manufacturing. This paper contributes by explicitly quantifying the...

This paper analyzes the potential and the limits of project finance for the provision of local public services and compares them with alternative instruments in the light of current regulation. The main requirements for project finance, even in non “pure” forms, to justify its complex...

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:...

We model the determinants of loans to non-financial corporations in the euro area. Using the Johansen (1992) methodology, we identify three cointegrating relationships. These relationships are interpreted as the long-run loan demand, investment and loan supply equations. The short-run dynamics...

Recent empirical literature shows that key macro variables such as GDP and productivity display long memory dynamics. For DSGE models, we propose a �Generalized� Kalman Filter to deal effectively with this problem: our method connects to and innovates upon data-filtering techniques...

This paper investigates possible non-linearities in the response of bank lending to monetary policy shocks in the euro area. The credit market is modelled over the period 1985-2005 by means of an Asymmetric Vector Error Correction Model (AVECM) involving four endogenous variables (loans to the...

This paper presents ideas and methods underlying the construction of an indicator that tracks the euro area GDP growth, but, unlike GDP growth, (i) is updated monthly and almost in real time; (ii) is free from hort-run dynamics. Removal of short-run dynamics from a time series, to isolate the...