The increasing literature on the interactions between liberalisation-integration of product markets and labour market reforms is often highly speculative and draws on a rather weak empirical basis. Cross-country indicators of regulatory frameworks are often lacking, making it difficult to...

The Importance of innovation for the economic performance of industrialized countries has been largely stressed recently by the theoretical and empirical literature. Very few studies have carefully considered the determinants of European innovation, the productivity of its R&D and the existence...

To the layman, the upward trend in European unemployment is related to the slowdown in economic growth. We argue that the layman's view is correct. The increase in European unemployment and the slowdown in economic growth are related, because they stem from a common cause: an excessively high...

The recent dismal performance of overall job creation has left Italy, as of the end of the 90's, with very low participation and high unemployment rates. Moreover, Italy exhibits a large regional dispersion of those variables when compared to similar European Union economies. The present paper,...

In this paper we suggest a framework to assess the degree of reliability of provisional estimates as forecasts of final data, and we reexamine the question of the most appropriate way in which available data should be used for ex ante forecasting in the presence of a data revision process....

We propose a general framework to study whether and how common trends and common cycles are still present when the original variables are linearly aggregated or only a subset of them is analysed. This is particularly important because of the adoption in empirical analysis of aggregated data on a...

After the creation of the European Monetary Union (EMU), both the European Commission (EC) and the European Central Bank (ECB) are focusing more and more on the evolution of the EMU as a whole, rather than on single member countries. A particularly relevant issue from a policy point of view is...

Time series models are often adopted for forecasting because of their simplicity and good performance. The number of parameters in these models increases quickly with the number of variables modelled, so that usually only univariate or small-scale multivariate models are considered. Yet, data...

Aggregate data from the regions of Southern Italy are used to test whether risk is a significant determinant of the decision to migrate abroad or inside the country. This indeed appears to be the case for both foreign and domestic migrations, after controlling for unemployment and wage...

This paper develops tests for selection of competing non-linear dynamic models. The null hypothesis is that the models are equally close the Data Generating Process (DGP), according to a certain measure of closeness. The alternative is that one model is closer to the DGP. The models can be...