We estimate the degree of ‘stickiness’ in aggregate consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption habits) for thirteen advanced economies. We find that, after controlling for measurement error, consumption growth has a high degree of auto-correlation, with a stickiness...

We estimate the sticky information Phillips curve model of Mankiw and Reis (2002) using survey expectations of professional forecasters from four major European economies. Our estimates imply that inflation expectations in France, Germany and the United Kingdom are updated about once a year, in...

The paper considers a neo-classical model set in the cost function approach to estimate primary energy factor demands for the Italian economy, using a translog cost function specification. Cointegration theory is employed to estimate the long-run factor share model, and the general to specific...

We study the relationship between (log) current earnings and educational levels in Italy. In line with other international evidence, we find that OLS under-estimate the marginal return to additional education. When the endogeneity of educational choice is taken into account, the marginal return...

The purpose of this paper is to provide an update of the empirical evidence on the private returns to education in Italy. First, we show that, whilst returns to education in Italy (based on gross wages) are in line with the European average, educational attainment is generally much lower...

We analyse the dynamics of firms' employment decisions which underlie lumpy and kinked adjustment costs. We consider a dynamic structural model in which, in each period, firms face a choice of whether to vary the labour input or to postpone the adjustment to the future. By exploiting the first...

By focusing on the Italian experience, we ask whether the relationship between labour taxes and unemployment varies across regions. In spite of similar national labour market institutions, we show that this relationship is significantly stronger in the highly industrialised North than in the...

Individual absolute risk aversion is measured for a sample of 1373 male household heads, using the 1995 wave of the Survey on the Income and Wealth of Italian households. This measure, conditional on financial and real wealth and household income, is used as an instrument for attained education...

In this paper we study the determinants of investment decisions at the firm level with heterogeneous capital goods. We exploit a newly developed panel dataset of small and medium-sized firms which allows us to distinguish between purchases, sales, and net acquisitions of capital goods. We...

Many economic applications involve the modeling of a binary variable as simultaneously determined with one of its dycotomous regressors. In this paper we deal with a prominent health economics case study, that of cesarean section delivery utilization across public and private hospitals....