Was there a textbook-like Phillips curve in post-WWII Italy? We estimate a consensus model of the relationship between inflation and the level of economic activity over 1949-1998, finding no evidence of a significant and positive feedback from output to prices. We also estimate similar models...

Thanks to the Maastricht Treaty and similar arrangements, central banks nowadays enjoy considerable independence. This is generally believed to be the result of relatively recent debates, which led to the conclusion that sheltering monetary authorities from the pressures of fiscal policymakers...

L’analisi dell’andamento del tasso di sconto italiano durante il Gold Standard è molto scarna. Questo lavoro comincia a rimediare al problema sia stimando alcuni semplici modelli del tasso di sconto con serie storiche a frequenza mensile e annua, sia con un’analisi documentale. Il...

We estimate forward-looking interest-rate rules, for major advanced countries, allowing for time variation in their parameters. Traditional constant-parameter reaction functions likely blur the impact of i) model uncertainty, ii) conflicting objectives, iii) shifting preferences and iv)...

This paper considers an environment where investors have limited knowledge of true systematic risks and therefore continuously re-estimate the forecasting model that they use to form expectations. Based on a parsimonious specification with learning and no conditioning information, I extract...

I employ a parsimonious model with learning but without conditioning information to extract time-varying measures of market-risk sensitivities, pricing errors and pricing uncertainty. Parameters estimated for U.S. equity portfolios show significant fluctuations, along patterns that change across...

The theme of this paper is whether there was a textbook-like Phillips curve in post- WWII Italy. We estimate a standard model of the relationship between inflation and the level of real economic activity over the 1949 to 1998 period and find no evidence of a significant and positive feedback...

We examine Italian inflation rates and the Phillips curve with a very long-run perspective, one that covers the entire existence of the Italian lira from political unification (1861) to Italy’s entry in the European Monetary Union (end of 1998). We first study the volatility, persistence and...

Have Italian mutual funds been able to generate "extra-return"? Were some of them able to persistently beat the competitors? In this paper we address thee question and provide a detailed and systematic performance and return persistence analysis of the Italian equity mutual funds. We show that,...

In credit risk modelling, jump processes are widely used to de- scribe both default and rating migration events. This work is mainly a review of some basic denitions and properties of the jump processes intended for a preliminary step before more ad- vanced lectures on credit risk modelling. We...