This article analyses possible targets for the Italian debt-to-GDP ratio with a small macroeconomic model. The role of international macroeconomic variables such as the US GDP growth, prices of raw materials, EUR/USD exchange rate and European Central Bank (ECB) monetary policy stance and...

The trend growth rate of the Italian economy has been declining since the 1980s. To examine how to offset this trend, we estimate a simple specification of an endogenous growth model. Cointegrating equations for the long-run output growth and its determinants are estimated with alternative time...

The Italian labour market is characterized by large and persistent regional unemployment differentials. This study uses recent panel unit root and cointegration tests to derive the long-run properties of the Italian regional unemployment disparities. The empirical evidence suggests that the...

This paper examines stochastic convergence in real per capita GDP for Italian regions using recent non-stationary panel data methodologies over the period 1951 to 2002. Economies stochastically converge when regional differences across economies are not persistent, and long-run movements in a...

We evaluate the empirical evidence regarding stochastic convergence in income across a group of 29 countries. Our results are based on a new unit root test developed by Popp (2008) that estimates the break-date more accurately and does not suffer from size distortions in the presence of a break....

Using Monte Carlo simulations, it is shown that fitting a mis-specified GARCH model to a true MS-GARCH process tends to produce IGARCH parameter estimates. In other words, the presence of structural breaks can result in spuriously high estimates of the degree of persistence of shocks to the...

We analyse whether tests of PPP exhibit erratic behaviour (as previously reported by Caporale et al., 2003) even when (possibly unwarranted) homogeneity and proportionality restrictions are not imposed, and trivariate cointegration (stage-three) tests between the nominal exchange rate, domestic...

In this article, we carry out unit root tests on real exchange rates recursively as in Caporale et al. (2003), but, following Arghyrou and Gregoriou (2007), we adjust the residuals for non-normality and heteroscedasticity using a wild bootstrap method. The results are striking: this correction...

This article estimates a fractional integration model with nonlinear deterministic trends for the inflation rates of five African countries. The results indicate that nonlinearities are present in the case of Angola and Lesotho, but not in the case of Botswana, Namibia and South Africa....

This article examines the stochastic properties of US term spreads with parametric and semi-parametric fractional integration techniques. Since the observed data (rather than the estimated residuals from a cointegrating regression) are used for the analysis, standard methods can be applied. The...