“Being rich in energy resources – a blessing or a curse” finds that an energy resource curse plagues many EU supplier states. This in turn directly affects Europe’s energy supply security and threatens to engulf Europe in unwanted hostilities at home and abroad. The study addresses seven...

This paper proposes a first attempt for the development of a statistical tool where basic measures and/or tests (i.e. individual indicators) are organised and grouped in composite indices addressing different dimensions within Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA). The latter can be variously...

This paper studies the issue of whether money contains useful information about future inflation in a panel of nine developed countries. A low frequency estimate of excess money growth is compared to an estimate of the inflation trend following the discussion in Woodford (2007). The empirical...

This paper examines the length of stay of cultural tourists in a mountain destination, on the North-East of Italy. A microeconomic perspective of cultural tourism is provided, where the interest is to analyse the attitude of visitors regarding culture and their overall vacation. To this aim,...

In this paper, we aim at forecasting the stochastic volatility of key financial market variables with the Kalman filter using stochastic models developed by Taylor (1986,1994) and Nelson (1990). First, we compare a stochastic volatility model relying on the Kalman filter to the conditional...

This study analyses spending behaviour of international visitors to Italy. In specific it focuses on the impact that visitors’ satisfaction with different attributes of the trip exerts on expenditure among different service categories. Despite a general recognition by the economic literature...

We explore to what extent key functions in manufacturing are spatially clustered with, or dispersed from,each other within industries, and how these clustering or dispersion patterns have changed during recent decades. Estimating the levels and changes (1992–2007) of localizations and...

The preponderance of the linear approach in the stock market modeling is the result of the Frisch-Slutsky paradigm which implies that the market can only converge to an equilibrium point or diverge, according to a monotonic or oscillatory trajectory. Moreover, this description of reality is...

The problem of outliers is well-known in statistics: an outlier is a value that is far from the general distribution of the other observed values, and can often perturb the results of a statistical analysis. Various procedures exist for identifying outliers, in case they need to receive special...

This discussion paper led to an article in the <I>Journal of Applied Econometrics</I> (2005). Vol. 20, issue 2, pages 311-323.<P> Various economic theories are available to explain the existence of credit and default cycles. There remains empirical ambiguity, however, as to whether or these cycles...</p></i>