Survey data attract considerable interest as timely and reliable series for assessing the state of the economy. We investigate the relationship between the manufacturing PMI and the Index of Industrial Production (IPI) for Italy, with a special focus on the effects of the latest crisis. The...

Payment systems track economic transactions and therefore could be considered important indicators of economic activity. This paper describes the available monthly data on the retail settlement system for Italy and selects some of them for short-term forecasting. Using a mixed frequency factor...

Following the debate on the relationship between business and financial cycle rekindled in the last decade since the global financial crisis, we assess the ability of some financial indicators to track the Italian business cycle. We mostly use credit variables to detect the turning points and to...

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 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...

We study how FDI affects the financial structure of targeted firms, by looking at a sample of foreign acquisitions that occurred in Italy between 1998 and 2016. We show that the entry of foreign investors promotes the diversification of financing sources. Moreover, foreign acquisitions lower...