The paper reconstructs the items of the regional accounts, disposable income and wealth of the household sector for the North-West, North-East, Centre, and South and Islands for the years 1970-1995. The analysis is significant for the length of the sample period, the number of time series...

This study represents a first attempt to empirically analyze the role of firm heterogeneity in regional business cycle behaviour. Working with monthly Italy’s firms data and estimating a random effects ordered probit model, we first document sizable asymmetries in Northern and Southern...

This paper provides a description of Istat’s new Macroeconometric Model MeMo-It. This is the tool used by Istat to produce bi-annual medium-term forecasts of the Italian economy since May 2012. The key model’s features are illustrated and compared with other modeling approaches used in the...

This paper examines structural changes in the Italian manufacturing sector, focusing labour productivity in recent decades. To this end it distinguishes between trend movements in the data using a multivariate unobserved components model. Changes relative importance of cyclical and trend...

This paper examines structural changes in the Italian manufacturing sector, focusing on labour productivity in recent decades. To this end it distinguishes between trend and cyclical movements in the data using a multivariate unobserved components model. Changes in the relative importance of...

This paper analyzes the existing relationship between economic growth and the monitoring of corruption and examines the possible outcome of the implementation of a State reform in order to weed out corruption. Growth is always higher when monitoring is high and therefore corruption eradicated....

We use data generated by a macroeconomic DSGE model to study the relative benefits of forecast combinations based on forecast-encompassing tests relative to simple uniformly weighted forecast averages across rival models. Assumed rival models are four linear autoregressive specifications, one of...

We investigate whether and to what extent multiple encompassing tests may help determine weights for forecast averaging in a standard vector autoregressive setting. To this end we consider a new test-based procedure, which assigns non-zero weights to candidate models that add information not...

There is a plethora of studies of regional production functions using stationary panel data. Only some recent works consider non-stationary panel data. All of them assume the hypothesis of cross-section independence. Here, we claim that the independence assumption is too strong when regional...

We provide a systematic comparison of the out-of-sample forecasts based on multivariate macroeconomic models and forecast combinations for the euro against the US dollar, the British pound, the Swiss franc and the Japanese yen. We use profit maximization measures based on directional accuracy...