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 the entry of Italy in the European Monetary Union (end of 1998). We first study the volatility, persistence...

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...

We explore empirically the transmission of U.S. financial and macroeconomic uncertainty to emerging market economies (EMEs). We start by assuming that there are crucial differences between volatility and uncertainty, and between the latter and its shocks. With the help of Bayesian vector...

Since the seminal work of Oates (1972) on fiscal federalism, a central question of public finance has been which level of a federation should be assigned the provision of public goods. In this paper we study the problem of a government that is to choose the optimal...