This paper investigates the relationship between futures prices and financial investments in derivatives of the main agricultural commodities. We first provide a broad picture of how these markets function and how they have evolved, showing that traders who deal mostly in commodity index...

This paper extends some theoretical results of Morris and Shin (1998) concerning the role of uncertainty about fundamentals in currency crises and tests their empirical relevance using a novel approach based on the distribution of survey expectations. Econometric evidence from the Asian crisis...

When the economy is subject to recurrent structural shifts, the monetary authority cannot credibly commit to a systematic approach to policy, since consistency between promises and actions is not easily verifiable; moreover, since agents have incomplete knowledge of the surrounding environment,...

We study an endowment economy with complete markets and heterogeneous agents who do not have rational expectations, but form their beliefs using adaptive learning algorithms that may differ from one individual to another. We show that market completeness allows agents to smooth consumption...

The applied literature on adaptive learning has mostly focused on small, linear models, with homogenous expectations. In non-linear models heterogeneous expectations prevail and the process through which agents select (and change) a forecasting model becomes a necessary ingredient of the...

In this paper we show that long-run expectations about future housing prices of both households and, especially, financial intermediaries had a large impact on households' indebtedness during the recent boom in U.S. housing prices. We introduce the theory of natural expectations in a...

The Europe 2020 strategy commits Italy to reduce emissions by about 16 per cent by 2020, compared with 2005. In the case of transport, the sector that has contributed most to the growth of total emissions between 1990 and 2008, the 2020 target could be achieved by introducing a Carbon Tax (CT)....

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...