Understanding the dynamics of the leverage ratio is at the heart of the empirical research about firms' capital structure, as they can be very different under alternative theoretical models. The pillars of almost all empirical applications are the maintained assumptions of poolability and...

How did post-communist transformations affect people's perceptions of their economic and political systems? We model a pseudo-panel with 89 country-year clusters, based on 13 countries observed between 1991 and 2004, to identify the macro and institutional drivers of the public opinion. Our main...

The main purpose of this paper is to develop generalized 'State Dependent Models' (SDM) in a multivariate framework for empirical analysis. This significantly extends the existing SDM which only allow univariate analysis following a simple AR process. The extended model enables greater...

The preliminary evidence in the literature suggests that changes in uncertainty have a role in shaping the U.S. economic cycle. But what is effectively measured by the different available indicators of uncertainty still remains an "uncertain" issue. This paper has two aims: (i) to introduce a...

Building on the literature on regularization and dimension reduction methods, we have developed a quarterly forecasting model for euro area GDP. This method consists in bridging quarterly national accounts data using factors extracted from a large panel of monthly and quarterly series including...

In this paper, we model business investment distinguishing between ICT (communication equipment, hardware and software) and Non-ICT (machinery and equipment, and nonresidential buildings) components and taking into account asset specific characteristics potentially affecting the reactivity of...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the microfoundations of how non-experts' (or general public) form inflation expectations. Using a unique dataset we investigate the range of near rational inflation expectations. An important contribution to understanding how non-experts form their...

The purpose of the present paper is to study how households form inflation expectations. Using a novel survey-base dataset of Italian households' opinions of inflation we investigate two separate, but related, types of behavior: 'inattentiveness' and 'anchoring'. The present analysis extends the...