This paper presents a ""bridge model"" for short-run (one or two quarters ahead) forecasting of Italian GDP, relying on industrial production and survey indicators as key variables that can help in providing a real-time first GDP estimate. For a one- to two-year horizon, it formulates and...

This paper tests for the presence of a credit channel (particularly a bank-lending sub-channel) for monetary policy in the housing market. We argue that the importance of this channel for investment in residential housing is highly dependent on the structural features, and particularly the...

A structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) approach is used to identify the forces driving house prices fluctuations in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the UK over the period 1970-1998. Quarterly time series for real house prices, GDP, money, inflation and interest rates are...

Using year-by-year measures of income distribution provided by the LIS dataset for eight continental Europe countries, this paper considers the recent literature on income inequality and growth to test the following propositions: does inequality converge during the process of economic growth?...