Investment in adaptation is a critical strategy to reduce the damages from climate change, yet there is limited evidence about its effectiveness and costs. We exploit the activation of a sea wall to protect the city of Venice from increasingly high tides to provide new evidence on the...

We quantify the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on housing demand of Italian households by exploiting new information on their search activity on the market. The data comes from two unique datasets: the Italian Housing Market Survey, conducted quarterly on a large sample of real estate agents,...

The paper assesses the performance of medium-term forecasts of euro-area GDP and inflation obtained with a DSGE model and a BVARX model currently in use at the Bank of Italy. The performance is compared with that of simple univariate models and with the Eurosystem projections; the same real time...

Covid-19 caused an abrupt disruption in the world economy and posed big challenges to macroeconomic and time-series analysis. The deep trough in the business cycle was unprecedented in momentum and magnitude, was not approached smoothly, and the pandemic shock was not heralded by any warning...

The Covid-19 epidemic affected the ability of traditional forecasting models to produce reliable scenarios for the evolution of economic activity. We combine macroeconomic variables with epidemiological indicators to account for the Covid-19 shock and predict the short-term evolution of Italian...

This study analyzes high-frequency data on credit cards to identify the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Italian consumer transactions. Using an event study approach, it finds that during the national lockdown total transactions fell by over 50%. The decline was particularly severe in...

This paper provides an overview of how information on payments has been recently exploited by Banca d’Italia staff for the purposes of tracking economic activity and forecasting. In particular, the payment data used for this work are drawn from the payment systems managed by Banca d’Italia...

One of the key questions about the current economic recovery in the euro area is why the decline in unemployment recorded since the second half of 2013 has been accompanied by subdued growth in nominal wages. In this paper we adopt a Phillips curve framework to assess whether alternative...

Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, household consumption fell dramatically and the propensity to save rose to unprecedented levels. In this paper we investigate the drivers of households' behaviour in Italy from a macro and microeconomic perspective. At the aggregate level, we find...

Motivated by the magnitude and cyclicality of transitions into and out of the labour force, we jointly estimate natural unemployment and participation rates through a forward-looking Phillips curve informed by structural labour market flows and demographic trends. We find that the estimated...