The exact linear dependency among age, period and birth cohort makes it impossible to recover the true parameters of Age-Period-Cohort (APC) models. We then propose to extract reliable information from APC models via the Shapley decomposition, a model-agnostic procedure from game theory that...

This paper examines the relative cyclical affiliation in six industrialized economies. While the broad conclusions are consistent with the existing literature, the proposed empirical framework is not based on correlations and permits the analysis of relative groupwise synchronization under very...

As recently suggested, the shadow economy and its determinants (taxation, regulations, corruption, etc.) are linked such that just two stable equilibria are possible. In the good one there is a small hidden sector, large fiscal revenues and honest/appreciated institutions. The other (bad)...

This paper presents an empirical investigation of the two faces of the Italian labour market, the dark and the regular. Results from 'exhaustive' VAR/VEC models suggest that there are no connections (causal relationships, feedback, contemporaneous correlation) between them. In this sense, we...

Standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models are populated by fully-informed-optimising Muth-rational agents. This kind of agent is at odds with well-known psychological biases, not to mention real life people. In particular, there are strong theoretical and empirical reasons to...

Virtually all governments seek to fight tax evasion exploiting better and better technological devices. Despite of that the phenomenon still remains alive and kicking all around the world. The foregoing naturally arises the question in the title. This paper develops a simple model to provide...

This paper examines the emergence of economic clubs and its coherence with the european commitments. to this end, it analyses business cycle comovements in six industrialised economies, which are pooled into several clusters. results lead to conclude that an english-speaking club (canada, uk,...

We propose an expectations formation mechanism (EFM) aimed to explain the median – hence lay – forecaster’s year-ahead inflation predictions. The EFM is a time-varying combination of long-run expectations, current inflation and uncertainty with weights naively calibrated according to...

Underground activities affect crucial fiscal ratios generating “gaps” both in government revenues and in national accounts. I address this topic exploiting the peculiarities of the Italian situation. First, I describe the pros and cons of the Italian method to estimate the (non trivial share...

As recently suggested, the shadow economy and its determinants (taxation, regulations, corruption, etc.) are linked such that just two stable equilibria are possible. In the good one there is a small hidden sector, large fiscal revenues and honest/appreciated institutions. The other (bad)...