Using a simple method, based on forward interest spreads, we analyse the recent movements in the 10-year yield differentials between three currencies (Italian lira; Spanish peseta; Swedish krona) and the DM in order to gauge the extent to which the reduction in these differentials was due to...

The flattening of the Phillips curve observed in the industrial countries has been attributed to globalisation, while the traditional explanation centres on monetary policy credibility. The empirical literature is not conclusive, since macroeconomic data are affected by substantial...

This paper analyzes daily patterns in the settlement of payments in the European TARGET2 settlement system using a unique transaction-level data set. For the first time, we provide insights into the intraday patterns of bank-to-bank payments (a subset of all TARGET2 transactions) and identify...

The global financial and economic crisis has reopened the debate on the role, the efficacy and limits of fiscal policies in sustaining aggregate demand. At the same time, the crisis has worsened the prospects of unsustainability of public debt in some countries. In order to conciliate fiscal...

In this paper, we analyze firms' pricing behavior using a full informative micro dataset that accounts for a large part of Italian firms. In our view, “the black boxes” to examine are the relations between price setting, market structure and spatial disparities. The paper aims to extend the...

Can we use newspaper articles to forecast economic activity? Our answer is yes and, to this end, we propose a brand new economic dictionary in Italian with valence shifters, and we apply it to a corpus of about two million articles from four popular newspapers. We produce a set of high-frequency...