This paper studies empirically how uncertainty affects speculation in the foreign exchange markets. We use the dispersion of survey forecasts of key macroeconomic variables to measure uncertainty about fundamentals. We find that uncertainty has a non-monotone effect on exchange rate pressures:...

This paper presents the new competitiveness indicators of the Bank of Italy. While the old ones were calculated with reference to 25 industrial or OECD countries, the new indicators are available for 62 countries, including the main emerging and developing economies. In order to extend the...

We analyze the foundations of the relationship between trade and TFP in the Ricardian model. Under general assumptions about the autarky distributions of industry productivities, trade openness raises TFP. This is due to the selection effect of international competition --- driven by comparative...

We introduce a novel methodology to measure the relative TFP of the tradeable sector across countries, based on the relationship between trade and TFP in the model of Eaton and Kortum (2002). The logic of our approach is to measure TFP not from its "primitive" (the production function) but from...

In a Ricardian model with CES preferences and general distributions of industry efficiencies, the sources of the welfare gains from trade can be precisely decomposed into a selection and a reallocation effect. The former is the change in average efficiency due to the selection of industries that...

The paper describes the evolution of export shares and quantifies the contribution of the geographical and sectoral specialization for some industrial and emerging market economies between 1985 and 2003. While the strong growth of emerging countries as world competitors has lowered the market...

We introduce a two-country no-arbitrage term-structure model to analyse the joint dynamics of bond yields, macroeconomic variables and the exchange rate. The model allows to understand how exogenous shocks to the exchange rate affect the yield curves, how bond yields co-move in different...