The paper argues that the traditional difficulty encountered in finding evidence on the effects of credit availability on economic activity depends on the fact that these effects are powerful but rare and vary with the cycle. The global financial crisis offers an opportunity to test this...

We assess the impact on the Italian economy of the main unconventional monetary policies adopted by the ECB in 2011-2012 (SMP, 3-year LTROs and OMTs) by following a two-step approach. We evaluate their effects on money market interest rates, government bond yields and credit availability and...

This paper reviews the main literature and evidence on the relevance of fiscal dominance in Italy in the last part of the 20th century and examines the evolution of the techniques of Treasury financing and of monetary targets. In the early 1970s budget deficits and monetary base creation were...

How are the dynamics of foreign and domestic sales correlated at the firm level? The question is relevant in that the sign of the correlation shapes the international transmission of shocks and the effects of policy measures. From a theoretical perspective, the correlation could be either zero,...

The flattening of the Phillips curve observed in the industrial countries has been attributed to globalisation, while the traditional explanation centres on monetary policy credibility. The empirical literature is not conclusive, since macroeconomic data are affected by substantial...

The paper studies the transmission of monetary policy shocks in Italy, by means of a structural VAR, using a long data sample; focusing on a long sample period permits a comparison between the Italian evidence and the international literature and makes it possible to test the robustness of the...

This paper assesses the relevance of national information in estimating the demand for euro-area M3 from three perspectives. First, we check whether aggregating national money demands is appropriate. Second, we compare time-series and panel methods to estimate aggregate long-run coefficients....

The paper exploits a unique panel, covering some 2,000 Italian manufacturing firms and 14 years of data on individual prices and individual interest rates paid on several types of debt, to address the question of the existence of a channel of transmission of monetary policy operating through the...

We assemble an original panel of 2,500 restaurant prices in Italy over the period 1998-2004 to study whether, and through which channels, the introduction of euro coins and banknotes had an impact on individual pricing behaviour. We reach three conclusions. Firstly, the evidence suggest that the...

In this paper we assess whether monetary variables, which are observed with little delay, conveyed marginal information on the state of the Italian economy in the 1990s, taking as a benchmark the forecasting errors generated by the quarterly model used by the Bank of Italy. We follow two...