This paper is aimed at analysing the decision of the Chinese central bank to reform the exchange rate of the national currency and to gauge the effects of this change in regime on the Chinese economy and the world currency markets. Although many nations have been largely disappointed by the...

A Climate Change Damage Function (CCDF) is a reduced form relationship linking macroeconomic aggregates (e.g., potential GDP) to climate indicators (e.g., average temperature levels). This function is used in a variety of studies about climate change impacts and policy analysis. However, despite...

This paper provides the theoretical and operational framework for estimating past values of relevant time series starting from a (limited) information set. We consider a general approach that includes as special cases time series aggregation and temporal and/or spatial disaggregation problems....

This paper explores how the occurrence of local indeterminacy and endogenous business cycles relates to dynamic inefficiency, as defined by Malinvaud (1953), Phelps (1965) and Cass (1972). We follow Reichlin (1986) and Grandmont (1993) by considering a two-period OLG model of capital...

The relevance of bargaining to everyday life can easily be ascertained, yet the study of any bargaining process is extremely hard, involving a multiplicity of questions and complex issues. The objective of this paper is to provide new insights on some dimensions of the bargaining process –...

In this paper I discuss various notions and aspects of integration and macroeconomic convergence, namely economic and monetary integration; real and nominal convergence. The EU has offered a great deal of information about the relation between all these types of integration and macroeconomic...

The class of Markov switching models can be extended in two main directions in a multivariate framework. In the first approach, the switching dynamics are introduced by way of a common latent factor. In the second approach a VAR model with parameters depending on one common Markov chain is...

In this paper we investigate the size of the consumption drop at retirement in Italy. We use micro data on food and total non-durable household spending covering the period 1993-2004, and evaluate the change in consumption that accompanies retirement by exploiting the exogenous variability in...

We introduce labor contracts, in a framework of optimal redistribution: firms have some local market power and try to discriminate among heterogeneous workers. In this setting we show that if the firms have perfect information, i.e, they perfectly discriminate against workers and take all the...

We analyse the effects of pension reforms on the planned retirement age of women by exploiting within country variation in pension wealth across cohorts of workers in Italy after the Amato and Dini reforms of the early 1990s, which introduced a “Notionally Defined Contribution” (NDC) method...