The number and the distribution of non-working days during the year has recently entered the policy debate related to the slow pace of the European economy.The fact that the number of non-working days can affect the quarter to quarter performance of GDP is well known and hardly disputable. It...

The paper looks at an often debated issue - the decline observed in business cycle volatility - from a rather original point of view represented by careful consideration of qualitative data deriving from Business Tendency Surveys. It first concentrates on the manufacturing sector, providing...

The purpose of the present paper is to study how households form inflation expectations. Using a novel survey-base dataset of Italian households' opinions of inflation we investigate two separate, but related, types of behavior: 'inattentiveness' and 'anchoring'. The present analysis extends the...