The paper evaluates the effectiveness of a major Italian place-based policy (Contratti di Programma), by means of which the state approves and finances industrial projects proposed by private firms. Using the areas to be exposed to the same policy at a later date as counterfactuals, the study...

This paper measures the impact of wage zones � minimum wage differentials at the province level � on Italy's local labor markets during the 1950s. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design, it finds that for the industrial sectors covered under wage zones there was an increase in...

The ECB objective of price stability is given a quantitative content as a year-on-year growth rate in the euro area HICP close but below 2% over the medium term. While this objective is referred to area-wide price developments, in anticipating monetary policy moves, market analysts pay...

This paper is the result of the Bank of Italy-CEPR project to construct a monthly coincident indicator of the business cycle of the euro area. The index is estimated on the basis of a harmonized data set of monthly statistics of the euro area (951 series) which we constructed from a variety of...

This paper proposes an index of core inflation for the euro area which exploits information from a large panel of time series on disaggregated prices, industrial production, labor market indicators, financial and monetary variables. The index is the result of a smoothing operation at both the...

This paper investigates the business cycle properties of the euro area and computes a coincident and a leading indicator of economic activity. We accomplish this by applying the newly introduced generalized factor model to a properly constructed and harmonized data set of short term statistics...

In this paper we develop a mixed frequency dynamic factor model featuring stochastic shifts in the volatility of both the latent common factor and the idiosyncratic components. We take a Bayesian perspective and derive a Gibbs sampler to obtain the posterior density of the model parameters. This...