The paper surveys three broad categories of labour market institutions in Italy: employment protection legislation, unemployment benefit systems, and wage bargaining arrangements. In each case, the recent evolution and current state of Italian institutions are evaluated and compared with those...

Turning stress tests into a useful tool for assessing system-wide risk requires the following: (1) incorporating general equilibrium dimensions, so that the outcome of the test depends not only on the size of the shock and the initial buffers of individual institutions, but also on their...

Gravity factors explain a large part of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows in transition economies, including in Southeastern Europe—a region not comprehensively covered before in econometric studies—but host country policies also matter. Key are policies that affect unit labor costs,...

Assessing and monitoring systemic risk is a challenge for policy makers andsupervisors in all countries. It is particularly challenging in low-income countries (LICs),owing to a number of characteristics shared to a greater or lesser extent by most of them.This paper discusses these common...