Current account (CA) dispersion within European Union (EU) member states has been increasing progressively since the 1990s. Interestingly, the persistent deficits in many peripheral countries have not been accompanied by a significant growth process able to stimulate a log run rebalancing as...

The neoclassical and OCA theories predict that higher capital market openness, providing better risk sharing opportunities, should enable catching up and convergence among countries. However, starting from ‘90s, Current Account (CA) dispersions within European Union (EU) member States have...

This paper investigates the underlying sources of the Italian industrial sector fluctuations. It concentrates in particular on the role of different shocks on the manufacturing business cycle. To this end, it considers both domestic shocks (to hours worked and to technology) and external shocks...

Potential output and the related concept of output gap play a central role in the macroeconomic policy interventions and evaluations. In particular, the output gap, defined as the difference between actual and potential output, conveys useful information on the cyclical position of a given...

This paper examines structural changes in the Italian manufacturing sector, focusing on labour productivity in recent decades. To this end it distinguishes between trend and cyclical movements in the data using a multivariate unobserved components model. Changes in the relative importance of...

The aim of this paper is to empirically investigate the cyclical features of the main Italian Manufacturing Business Survey indicators using time and frequency domain techniques. In particular, it analyzes the dynamics of each survey variable over time and with respect to different benchmark...

The Joint harmonized EU Investment survey, carried out for Italy by the Institute for Studies and Economic Analysis (ISAE), provides quantitative information about investment plans and the structure of investment and qualitative data on the factors influencing firm’ behavior. As shown in the...

This paper investigates the underlying sources of the Italian industrial sector fluctuations. It concentrates in particular on the role of different shocks on the manufacturing business cycle. To this end, it considers both domestic shocks (to hours worked and to technology) and external shocks...

In recent years a number of studies have investigated stylised facts concerning the most important US macroeconomic time series(Stock and Watson, 2002; McConnell and Perez-Quiros, 2000; Blanchard and Simon, 2001; Arias, Hansen, and Ohanian, 2006); One of the main results of the analysis concerns a marked...