This obituary of Siro Lombardini recalls his scientific, operative and public activities and gives an obviously preliminary appraisal of his main innovative contributions to a surprisingly long list of economic issues such as: theory of the firm and markets, supply and demand disequilibrium,...

Business cycle models are often investigated by using reduced form time series models, other than (or in alternative to) structural highly grounded in economic theory models. Reduced form VARMA with fixed parameters play a key role in business cycle analysis, but it is often found that by their...

Scientific contributions, personality and relationship with Italian Institutions of 1980 Nobel Prize winner L.R.Klein are described in this paper. Education, main steps of his scientific discoveries, dissemination work and real-world applications are presented. The main contacts with Italy went...

We test the impact of import penetration on the productivity of a sample of roughly 35,000 Italian manufacturing firms operating in the period 1996-2003, considering the impact on productivity of both import penetration in the same industry and import penetration in the up-stream industries. We...

The objective of this paper is to analyse the efficiency of the Italian Banking System over the period 2006-2011. The Stochastic Frontier Approach (SFA) is applied to a panel of 700 Italian Banks. The analysis is based on the joint estimation of a cost function and an efficiency equation...

This paper considers the increased incidence of insecure job conditions for young individuals entering the Italian labour market and their chances of moving to a more secure job-condition after a reasonable period of time. In particular, we investigate empirically whether and how long-term...

The aim of these notes is to point out and address a few technical problems concerning the so-called «IS» equation in the New Keynesian macroeconomic model. First, in the basic NK model with sole consumption, the consumption function is not properly derived from first principles (the...

Giuseppe Toniolo must be recognised as one of the leading Italian economists animating the debate on the role of credit at the turn of the XIX and XX centuries. While his contribution was limited on theoretical grounds, it must be acknowledged that his strong reference to ethics conferred a...

In this paper we empirically show that given the positive causal relationship running from investment in risky assets to precautionary saving, portfolio diversification mitigates the effect of financial risk upon desired precautionary savings. Using a self-reported measure of desired...

In this paper we clarify the differences between a procedure that uses an estimate of the standard cost and one that estimates an expenditure function. The former involves applying a structural form that requires an acceptable measurement of the outputs produced, while the latter opts for the...