This paper investigates whether a public sector premium exists after controlling for observable characteristics and for additional motivations, other than monetary, that may induce workers to prefer employment in the public sector. We study the entire conditional wage distribution on Italian...

This paper studies the effects of fiscal policy on private GDP, inflation and the long-term interest rate in Italy using a structural vector autoregression model. To this end, a database of quarterly cash data for selected fiscal variables for the period 1982:1-2004:4 is constructed, largely...

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,...