The aim of the paper is to assess the role of the Italian Consumer Sentiment Index (CSI) as an autonomous driving force of consumption decisions. We test for the presence of “rule of thumb” consumers as originally proposed by Cambell and Mankiw (1991), using sentiment measures distinguished...

The paper aims at investigating on the credit conditions experienced by Italian firms during the recent business cycle. In doing so, we use a novel dataset on firms’ opinions derived from the ISTAT Business Confidence surveys. The dataset allows us to add to existing literature in three...

The long and sustained expansion of the nineties has generated, especially in the US, widespread rumours about the “death of the cycle”. Nevertheless, towards the end of the last decade, it became clear that fluctuations of economic activity were far from being extinct. This has contributed...

The paper provides new evidence on possible structural breaks in the relationship among business Confidence and industrial activity in Europe in the aftermath of the recession. Possible interpretation is that the crisis has determined a change in the pattern of response in surveys, firms now...

The Joint harmonized Manufacturing survey for Italy, carried out by the Institute of Studies and Economic Analysis (ISAE, formerly ISCO), has a long history: it began on a quarterly basis in 1959, becoming monthly in 1962. The survey was then broadly modified in several occasions; in particular,...

Standard theory describes economic decisions as the result of optimising behaviour of well-informed economic agents. However, whether citizens are really well informed on economic data is still highly disputed. In order to investigate on this issue, since 2007 the Italian Consumers survey has...

The Italian Research Evaluation exercise for the period 2004-2010 has analyzed almost 185,000 among articles, books, patents and other scientific products submitted by Italian Universities and other public research bodies. In most cases, scientific publications have been peer reviewed; however, in...

This note demonstrates how performance measure congruity and noise determine an agency’s total surplus within an linear agency framework with multiple tasks. It provides a decomposition of agency costs, leading back to a congruity index previously proposed in the literature. In addition,...

We develop a model to show that cartels that produce goods with lower durability are easier to sustain implicitly. This observation gen- erates the following results: 1) implicit cartels have an incentive to pro- duce goods with an inefficiently low level of durability; 2) a monopoly or explicit...

In this paper, a promotion tournament is considered, where, at the beginning of the tournament, it is unknown how long the tournament lasts. Further, the promotion decision is based on the assessments of a supervisor with imperfect recall. In line with psychological research, the supervisor is...