Can we use newspaper articles to forecast economic activity? Our answer is yes and, to this end, we propose a brand new economic dictionary in Italian with valence shifters, and we apply it to a corpus of about two million articles from four popular newspapers. We produce a set of high-frequency...

This paper surveys the capacity of simple macroeconomic models - 'three easy pieces' - to account for persistent and positive valuations of privately issued assets based on the blockchain. Each of these three models - transactions demand for a means of payment, consumption-based capital asset...

The aim of the paper is to estimate a reliable quarterly time-series of potential output for the Italian economy, exploiting four alternative approaches: a Bayesian unobserved component method, a univariate time-varying autoregressive model, a production function approach and a structural VAR....

Two main hypotheses are usually put forward to explain the productivity advantages of larger cities: agglomeration economies and firm selection. Combes et al. (2012) propose an empirical approach to disentangle these two effects and fail to find any impact of selection on local productivity...

This paper proposes the use of Bayesian model averaging (BMA) as a tool to select the predictors' set for bridge models. BMA is a computationally feasible method that allows us to explore the model space even in the presence of a large set of candidate predictors. We test the performance of BMA...

The paper develops an early warning system to identify banks that could face liquidity crises. To obtain a robust system for measuring banks’ liquidity vulnerabilities, we compare the predictive performance of three models – logistic LASSO, random forest and Extreme Gradient Boosting – and...

Business investment is a very important variable for short- and medium-term economic analysis, but it is volatile and difficult to predict. Qualitative business survey data are widely used to provide indicators of economic activity ahead of the publication of official data. Traditional...

The aim of the paper is to understand the interaction between market and credit risk. Using a comprehensive set of Italian data, we apply a factor model to identify the common sources of risk driving fluctuations in the real and financial sectors. The common latent factors are then inserted in a...

This paper analyzes the relationship between commodity prices and consumer food prices in the euro area and in its largest economies (Germany, France and Italy) and tests whether the latter respond asymmetrically to shocks to the former. The issue is of particular interest for those monetary...

This paper contributes to the empirical literature on the magnitude of the network effects of public infrastructures, introducing a novel approach. After estimating the dynamics common to time series for the regional public capital stock, coordinated policy shocks are identified within a...