We analyse the developments of investment and investment financing in Italy since 1995, based on data from national accounts and the flow of funds. The exceptional fall in investment after the global financial crisis in 2007 concerned all institutional sectors and asset categories. However,...

This paper evaluates the performance of Italian local public enterprises (LPEs) with respect to their private sector counterparts. We address the following questions: i) do LPEs perform worse than (comparable) private firms?; ii) does the performance gap depend on the ownership structure (the...

The share of labour increased in the first half of the 1970s, declined slowly to its 1960s level in 2001, and since then has been rising. Between 1975 and 2001, the decline in the labour share was due in part to the recovery in profits, and in part to a steady increase in housing rents on GDP,...

Based on a large sample of mostly unlisted non-financial companies, this paper studies the relationship between business cycles and firms’ leverage, disentangling the relative contributions of debt and equity and assessing the role of firm size in explaining cross-sectional heterogeneity. I...

The two recessions that have hit Italy since the end of 2008 have raised the share of non-performing loans to businesses in banks' portfolios substantially. In this paper we evaluate to what extent the deterioration of credit quality was due not only to the decline in firms' sales during the...

The paper provides an analysis of cyclically-adjusted budget balances of local governments in Italy for the period 2002-07. We find that local government balances appear to be relatively sensitive to the business cycle. In particular, a shock of 1 per cent in GDP changes their resources by...

This paper proposes a comparative analysis of the main macroeconomic aggregates (both real and credit aggregates), and the monetary policy response during the most severe recessions experienced by the Italian economy. This descriptive study focuses mainly on the last forty years, a period for...

Since 2015 consumer loans have been rising fast in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Credit demand, specifically for consumer durables, has played a crucial role; the easing of supply conditions has been relevant only in Italy and Spain, which experienced stronger credit tightening during the...

This paper studies the characteristics of the recent evolution of loans to non-financial firms in Italy from an historical perspective, with the aim of ascertaining whether the ongoing recovery is creditless; the main demand- and supply-side determinants of credit are also discussed. We find the...

We investigate the dynamics of core inflation in Italy, with a special focus on the period of low inflation after 2014, through the lenses of a Phillips curve framework. Composite indicators of the Italian labour and financial market are constructed and included into a Phillips curve. A number...