The paper argues that the traditional difficulty encountered in finding evidence on the effects of credit availability on economic activity depends on the fact that these effects are powerful but rare and vary with the cycle. The global financial crisis offers an opportunity to test this...

This paper focuses on how multi-plant firms allocate their workforce and investments between headquarters or plants located in or close to the headquarters area (HQ plants) and those located in the same country but farther away from the headquarters area (non-HQ plants). Using survey data on...

Using data from Ufficio italiano dei cambi for the period 1997-2001, the study analyses the distribution of foreign direct investment (FDI) outflows by sector and local area of origin. It tries to identify which local industrial structures determine a larger propensity to invest abroad, focusing...

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...

In past years there have been suggestions for monetary policy to engineer higher inflation expectations to stimulate spending. We examine the relationship between the inflation expectations of firms and their investment plans using Italian business survey data over the period 2012-2016. We show...

We study the drivers of investment in Italy during the global financial crisis and the sovereign debt crisis. We focus on the effect of leverage while controlling for the role of other drivers: expected demand, profitability, access to credit and uncertainty. As firm-level leverage may be...

The paper assesses the extent to which mortgage rates in Italy are priced according to credit risk as proxied by the probability of household mortgage delinquency estimated using the EU-Silc database. For reasons of data availability we restrict the analysis of mortgage pricing to Italian...

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....

The aim of this paper is to evaluate whether domestic and foreign activities of Italian firms are mainly substitutes or complements. We take advantage of a unique firm-level panel data set from the Bank of Italy Survey of Industrial and Service Firms, which provides information on the...

Optimal Portfolio Theory prescribes that investors reduce their exposure to financial market risk as they get near to retirement. To assess the effect of ageing on portfolio choices, we study the case of an Italian defined contribution pension fund during the period 2002-08. We find that on...