This paper analyzes the effects of international trade on the relative demand for skilled workers in Italian local labor markets. We find that exports cause a sizable skill upgrading in the labor force by increasing the average level of education of the workforce and the share of white-collars...

The uncertainty surrounding economic forecasts is generally related to multiple sources of risks, of domestic and foreign origin. This paper studies the predictive distribution of Italian GDP growth as a function of selected risk indicators, related to both financial and real economic...

A standard model-based trend-cycle decomposition of Italian GDP yields a likelihood function that is relatively flat and has two local maxima. A Bayesian estimation of the model identifies output gap and trend components that match the features of the Italian business cycle well. In a bivariate...

The Bank of Italy quarterly econometric model (BIQM) is a large-scale ‘semi structural' macro-econometric model. It tries to strike the right balance between theoretical rigour and statistical fit to the data. This paper provides an update of the features and the properties of the model,...

The unsatisfactory performance of Italian export volumes in the last decade has been attributed to three factors: the product specialization still centered around traditional sectors, the small firm size and the exceptional rise in export unit values. This paper analyzes the latter with the aim...