This paper evaluates the direct and indirect effects of the sovereign debt crisis on Italy's potential output. The direct effects are captured by the increase in the interest rate paid by Italian borrowers in the second half of 2011, the indirect effects by the policy responses to the crisis...

he paper assesses the effects of increasing competition in the service sector in Italy which, based on cross-country comparisons, is the OECD country with the highest markups in non-manufacturing industries. We propose a two-region (Italy and the rest of the euro area) dynamic general...

We assess the short- and medium-term macroeconomic effects of competition-friendly reforms in the service sector when the monetary policy rate is stuck at the zero lower bound (ZLB) in a monetary union. We calibrate a large-scale multi-country multi-sector dynamic general equilibrium model to...

This paper studies optimal robust monetary policy when the central bank imperfectly observes potential output and has Knightian uncertainty about the intertemporal elasticity of substitution and the slope of the Phillips curve. The literature on optimal robust monetary policy has focused on...

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....

This paper introduces an adaptive algorithm for time-varying autoregressive models in the presence of heavy tails. The evolution of the parameters is determined by the score of the conditional distribution. The resulting model is observation-driven and is estimated by classical methods....

This paper investigates possible non-linearities in the response of bank lending to monetary policy shocks in the euro area. The credit market is modeled over the period 1985-2005 by means of an Asymmetric Vector Error Correction Model (AVECM) involving four endogenous variables (loans to the...

The paper estimates a closed-economy medium-scale model for the United States and the euro area to assess the current level of the natural rate of interest and shed light on its drivers. The dynamics of the model are driven by permanent and transitory shocks that bear some connection to the...

We assess the global macroeconomic implications of different strategies of official reserve management by developing a large scale new-Keynesian dynamic general equilibrium model of the world economy, calibrated on the euro area, the United States, China, Japan and the rest of the world. An...

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...