The Joint harmonized EU Investment survey, carried out for Italy by the Institute for Studies and Economic Analysis (ISAE), provides quantitative information about investment plans and the structure of investment and qualitative data on the factors influencing firm' behavior. As shown in the...

According to macroeconomic predictions firms are expected to be net borrowers: the net change of their financial assets should be smaller than the net change of their financial liabilities. However, since the mid-1990s, the non–financial sector has been on average a net lender in countries...

This paper evaluates the characteristics of a Point in Time (PiT) rating approach for the estimation of firms' credit risk in terms of procyclicality. To this end I first estimate a logit model for the probability default (PD) of a set of Italian non-financial firms during the period 2006-2012,...

Business survey indicators represent an important tool in economic analysis and forecasting practices. While there is wide consensus on the coincident properties of such data, there is mixed evidence on their ability to predict macroeconomic developments in the short term. In this study we...

The innovative feature of this paper is its attempt to estimate by panel data methodology an environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) for biodiversity for OECD countries in the period 1990-2010. We use a biodiversity terrestrial and marine index and include in the equation proxies for trade, FDI and...

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...

Several studies investigating environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) relationship for biodiversity, suffer from limitations and the empirical evidence is inconclusive. More specifically, with few exceptions, the previous EKC studies for biodiversity looked into the diversity of a particular species...