We study the impact of legal restrictions pertaining to pharmacy licences on hospitalizations. We use a reform approved in 2012 in Italy that increased the number of pharmacies allowed to operate in the national territory by 8%. We set up a regression discontinuity design exploiting monthly data...

The strong and prolonged deviation of money growth from its reference value since 2001 has caused concern among policy-makers about the upside risks to price stability from monetary developments. In this paper we provide evidence that these risks might be smaller than previously assumed. We...

I analyse the effects of a reduction in the tariffs of a trading partner on the exports of domestic firms. More precisely, I focus on how cross-industry differences in factor intensities and within-industry differences in firm productivities shape the response of the extensive (decision to...

We test whether and how the adoption of the euro, narrowly defined as the end of competitive devaluations, has affected member states’ productive structures, distinguishing between within and across sector reallocation. We find evidence that the euro has been accompanied by a reallocation of...

Using a simple method, based on forward interest spreads, we analyse the recent movements in the 10-year yield differentials between three currencies (Italian lira; Spanish peseta; Swedish krona) and the DM in order to gauge the extent to which the reduction in these differentials was due to...

The reliability of EMU's fiscal indicators has been questioned by recent episodes of large upward deficit revisions. This paper discusses the causes of such revisions in order to identify ways to improve monitoring. The computation of EMU's deficit indicator involves the assessment of accrued...

This paper presents ideas and methods underlying the construction of an indicator that tracks the euro area GDP growth, but, unlike GDP growth, (i) is updated monthly and almost in real time; (ii) is free from short-run dynamics. Removal of short-run dynamics from a time series, to isolate the...

In this paper we analyse the impact of immigrants on the type and quantity of natives’ jobs. We use data on fifteen Western European countries during the 1996-2010 period. We find that immigrants, by taking up manual-routine type of occupations pushed natives towards more “complex”...

This paper evaluates the macroeconomic impact of a programme for public infrastructure spending in the euro area (EA) under alternative assumptions about funding sources and the monetary policy stance. The quantitative assessment is made by simulating a dynamic general equilibrium model of a...