In the paper we assess the convergence hypothesis for the Italian economy over the period 1951-2000, using a new methodological approach. The approach is based on a two-step recursive principal components estimator, allowing to monitor the progress of the convergence process over time and to...

In this paper we investigate the long-run growth process in Italy and the US over the period 1920-2001, using a common trends model. Coherent with the neoclassical growth model, we find that long-run economic growth can be explained by two permanent shocks, namely a technological shock and a...

In this paper the long-run trend in CPI inflation (core inflation) for Italy is estimate over the 1962-1997 period within the frame work of a multivariate common trends model. In this framework core inflation is directly linked to money and wage growth and interpreted as the long-run forecast of...

This paper models the London stock market's response to the 1994 Periodic Review of prices in the English and Welsh water industry using both GARCH and stochastic volatility models. The results indicate that a significant reduction in the volatility of share prices for eight of the ten water and...

This paper assesses the sources of volatility persistence in Euro Area money market interest rates and the existence of linkages relating volatility dynamics. The main findings of the study are as follows. Firstly, there is evidence of stationary long memory, of similar degree, in all series....

In this article a realized regression version of the Britten-Jones (BJ, 1999) portfolio selection approach is proposed, yielding a conditional mean-variance efficient portfolio selection strategy. Application to euro area stock markets diversification, differently from other standard approaches,...

What are the sources of macroeconomic comovement among G-7 countries? Two main candidate explanations may be singled out: common shocks and common transmission mechanisms. In the article it is shown that they are complementary, rather than alternative, explanations. By means of a large-scale...

This paper contributes to the existing literature on central bank repo auctions. It is based on a structural econometric approach, whereby the primitives of bidding behavior (individual bid schedules and bid-shading components) are directly estimated. With the estimated parameters we calibrate a...

What explains the cross section of expected returns for the 25 size/value Fama-French portfolios? It is found that modelling time-varying betas is important to explain the cross-section of expected returns, as well as to comply with the time series restriction on Jensen-alpha. Support for a...

The paper investigates linkages between general macroeconomic conditions and the housing market for the G-7 area. Among the key results of the paper, we find that the US are an important source of global fluctuations not only for real activity, nominal variables and stock prices, but also for...