Despite the fact that in 2011 Italy will celebrate the 150th anniversary of its political unification, geographical disparities stand out as a prominent characteristic of the country. The paper estimates the trend of the cost-of-living differentials across regions in the half-century after the...

The paper show how changes in the state of credit may cause instability in the output and in the employment levels. The model revised Delli Gatti and Gallegati's version of the contribution by Greenwald and Stiglitz (1993) in a contest characterized by imperfect competition in the goods market...

The calculation of inflation rates for specific groups in Italy, according to family typology and profession, on various time horizons between 1996 and 2004, does not find significant differences. This result, surprising in particular for the first two years of the euro circulation, when a vivid...

The aim of this paper is to build a tool for performing forecasting exercises, allowing to obtain a reliable estimate of Italian consumer price inflation. To reach this goal we estimate a simple three-equation model for the short term forecasting of twelve-month percentage variations of the...

We analyze households’ economic freedom to determine their standard of living, characterized by their capacity to spend on housing, utilities, food, and transport: economic poverty is a lack of freedom due to budgetary constraints. We propose three new measures. The first is the classical...

This paper provides a detailed insight into the magnitude of price-level differentials among Italian regions, supplementing the data collected by Istat with information on house prices and rentals collected by Agenzia del Territorio and by the Bank of Italy and with estimates from other sources....

Three industrial organization (IO) models suggested by Dornbusch (1987) are here adapted to study the labor-cost effects on relative prices of tradable goods between the regions of a monetary union. The assumption of imperfect and segmented goods and labor markets makes the analysis best suited...

This paper examines regional inflation divergence within the European EMU aiming at characterizing the properties of inflation differentials. The empirical evidence suggests that a process of price level convergence in the EMU is well on its way.

Following the introduction of euro banknotes and coins many Italians perceived a much sharper increase in the price level than the moderate rise registered by the National Institute of Statistics. The paper shows that the apparent contradiction between the public�s perceptions and...

Italian Abstract:In questo saggio vengono utilizzati metodi di analisi delle serie storiche al fine di studiare le relazioni tra il rapporto debito pubblico/PIL e le sue determinanti macroeconomiche (quali il rapporto saldo primario/PIL, il PIL reale, il tasso di inflazione e il tasso di...