The aim of this paper is to analyze the selection process at work before and after compulsory schooling by assessing the determinants of school failures, dropouts and upper secondary school decisions of young Italians. The dataset is built combining individual data by the Labor Force Survey and...

We combine individual and aggregate-level level data on educational attainment to study the determinants of university drop-out in Italy, one of the worst performers among developed countries. Based on detailed information on a representative sample of secondary school graduates and on local...

The paper provides an analysis of the problems of construction of quality-adjusted price indexes within the framework of the theory of product differentiation. In the general case of price-making behaviour on the part of firms, hedonic regressions are defined on the basis of reduced forms of the...

The scapegoat theory of exchange rates (Bacchetta and van Wincoop 2004, 2013) suggests that market participants may attach excessive weight to individual economic fundamentals, which are picked as scapegoats to rationalize observed currency fluctuations at times when exchange rates are driven by...

The paper looks at the characteristics of Italian non-financial firms that accessed the bond market for the first time between 2002 and 2013. The results of logit estimations indicate that first-time bond issuers are significantly larger and more frequently listed on the stock exchange than...

Estimates of the real term structure for the euro area implied by French index-linked bonds are obtained by means of a smoothing spline methodology. The real term structure allows computation of the constant-maturity inflation compensation, which is compared with the surveyed inflation...

This paper uses the celebrated no-arbitrage affine Gaussian term structure model applied to index-linked and standard government bonds to derive expected inflation rates and inflation risk premia, in the euro area and in the US. Maximum likelihood estimates show that the model describes the...

What kind of information do stock prices offer for predicting velocity? This paper develops previous work by Milton Friedman for the US economy and shows that a wealth effect derived from the stock market has negatively influenced the ratio of nominal income to a broad definition of money in a...

This paper tests whether the reforms effected by the Italian Stock Exchange at the beginning of the nineties (creation of specialized intermediaries, obligation to trade on the official markets, screen-based trading and cash settlement) have increased market efficiency.

A striking feature of financial market behaviour in recent years has been the low level of price volatility over a wide range of financial assets and markets. The issue has attracted the attention of central bankers and financial regulators due to the potential implications for financial...