According to the Rockets and Feathers hypothesis (RFH), the transmission mechanism of positive and negative changes in the price of crude oil to the price of gasoline is asymmetric. Although there have been many contributions documenting that downstream prices are more reactive to increases than...

Following a seminal contribution by Bilbiie (2008), the Limited Asset Market Participation hypothesis has triggered a debate on DSGE models determinacy when the central bank implements a standard Taylor rule. We reconsider the issue here in the context of an exogenous money supply rule,...

This paper surveys recent contributions about internationalization and performance of Italian enterprises. It covers both theoretical and empirical studies taking a microeconomic perspective and studying a potential link between firms’ global involvement and heterogeneity in economic, human...

We study the impact of political knowledge on the attitudes of European citizens towards the possible distribution of responsibilities between European level institutions and national governments in three policy areas: foreign policy, defence and immigration policy. The hypothesis tested is that...

In this paper we show how a rich variety of dynamical behaviors can emerge in the standard Keynesian income-expenditure model when a nonlinearity is introduced, both in the cases with and without endogenous government spending. A specific sigmoidal functional form is used for the adjustment...

This paper explores the link between sourcing and performance for a representative sample of manufacturing firms located in Lombardy, the leading economic region in Italy. Survey estimation methods, applied to the authors’ original database, reveal that there exist some performance premia for...

In the paper a general framework for large scale modeling of macroeconomic and financial time series is introduced. The proposed approach is characterized by simplicity of implementation, performing well independently of persistence and heteroskedasticity properties, accounting for common...

Household portfolios include risky bonds, beyond stocks, and respond to permanent labour income shocks. This paper brings these features into a life-cycle setting, and shows that optimal stock investment is constant or increasing in age before retirement for realistic parameter combinations. The...

The empirical validation of the purchasing power parity (PPP) theory is generally based on real exchange rates built using consumer price indexes (CPI). The empirical evidence does not generally support the theory and this fact goes under the name of purchasing power parity puzzle. In this paper...

What is the role of financial speculation in determining the real oil price? We find that while macroeconomic shocks have been the major upward driver of the real oil price since the mid 1980s, financial shocks have also sizably contributed since early 2000s, and at a much larger extent since...