Nunn (2008) found a negative relationship between past slave exports and economic performance within Africa. Here we investigate these findings and the suggested causal pathway in further detail. Extending the sample period back in time we reveal that the coefficient on slave exports did not...

We analyse the evolution of emerging market loan spreads at a more disaggregated level than other current studies, providing statistical support to the assumption of the "speciality" of the international interbank market, to the extent that the pricing of interbank credit is insensitive to the...

The paper explores the long run evolution of Italy's performance in technological innovation as a function of international technology transfer, reconstructing the different phases and dimensions of Italian innovative activity, tracking the transfer of foreign technological knowledge through a...

Italy's economic growth over its 150 years of unified history did not occur at a steady pace nor was it balanced across sectors. Relying on an entirely new input (labour and capital) database by us built and presented in the Appendix, together with new Banca d'Italia estimates of GDP by sector,...

The paper explores the long run evolution of Italy's performance in technological innovation as a function of international technology transfer, reconstructing the different phases and dimensions of Italian innovative activity, tracking the transfer of foreign technological knowledge through a...

In this paper we investigate the main features of the Italian financial cycle, extracted by means of a structural trend-cycle decomposition of the credit-to-GDP ratio, using annual observations from 1861 to 2011. In order to draw conclusions based on solid historical data, we provide a thorough...

The book brings together a series of research papers presented at a workshop on "The trends of Italy's international tourism", held at the Bank of Italy in Rome on 22 June 2012, on occasion of the release, on Bank of Italy's website, of microdata from the Survey on international tourism in...

What is the relationship between real exchange rate misalignments and economic growth? And what effect, if any, did undervaluations or overvaluations of the lira/euro have on Italy's growth? We address these questions by presenting, first, three main facts: (i) there is a positive relationship...

This paper examines the product specialisation of Italian exports over the period 1985-2001 to identify the roots of Italy�s sluggish export performance with respect to world trade in the second half of the 1990s. In particular, the analysis focuses on the role of product specialisation in...

This paper compares main European countries and the euro area specialization patterns. The analysis, that covers the period 1988-1997 and is based on a detailed sectoral breakdown, provides evidence to assess the degree of structural differences and convergence among European countries, which...