This paper tests the hypothesis of liquidity hoarding in the Italian banking system during the 2007-2011 global financial crisis. According to this hypothesis, in periods of crisis, interbank markets stop working and central banks' interventions are ineffective because banks hoard the liquidity...

This paper studies over-the-counter (OTC) trading in the unsecured interbank market for euro funds. The goal of our analysis is to identify the determinants of the probability of trading, the bilateral rate and the quantity exchanged during the European sovereign debt crisis. We show how the...

A standard model-based trend-cycle decomposition of Italian GDP yields a likelihood function that is relatively flat and has two local maxima. A Bayesian estimation of the model identifies output gap and trend components that match the features of the Italian business cycle well. In a bivariate...

The Bank of Italy quarterly econometric model (BIQM) is a large-scale ‘semi structural' macro-econometric model. It tries to strike the right balance between theoretical rigour and statistical fit to the data. This paper provides an update of the features and the properties of the model,...

Even before the global crisis, the Italian economy was in difficulties internationally, but slow growth and a declining share of world trade were accompanied by a perceptible process of manufacturing transformation. This paper, using data from the Bank of Italy's survey of manufacturers,...

This paper analyses the effect of competition from low-wage countries on domestic activity, using data on 230 Italian manufacturing sectors between 1995 and 2007. We find that low-wage import penetration is negatively related to employment and other measures of activity. The effect is...

The paper investigates R&D and ICT investment at firm level, assessing their relative importance and the extent to which they are complements or substitutes. We use data on a large unbalanced panel sample from four consecutive waves of a survey of Italian manufacturing firms, together with a...

In this paper we provide fresh evidence on TFP performance in the Italian economy since 1995, taking into account the changing composition of primary inputs across different capital goods and employment skills, as well as technical progress embodied in different vintages of the productive...

I examine the effect of reducing export tariffs on the productivity of domestic suppliers of exporting firms. Using a panel of Chilean firms during a period of trade liberalization with the European Union, the United States, and the Republic of Korea, I show that the average reduction in the...

We investigate the productivity effects of eco-innovations at the firm level using a modified version of the CDM model (Crepon et al., 1998). The distinctive nature of environmental innovations, especially as regards the need for government intervention to create market opportunities, is likely...