Uncertainty has recently become a major concern for policymakers and academics. Spikes in uncertainty are often associated with recessions and have detrimental effects on the aggregate economy. This paper analyzes the effects of uncertainty on firms' hiring and investment decisions, both...

I consider an economy growing along the balanced growth path that is hit by an adverse shock to its capital accumulation process. The model integrates efficiency wages due to imperfect monitoring of the quality of labour in a search and matching framework with methods of dynamic general...

The question of how climate change and weather fluctuations affect the economy is high on the economic research agenda, but the quantification of the effects of temperatures at infra-annual frequencies still remains an open issue. Using daily county-level data since 1970, I construct quarterly...

Building on the New Area Wide Model, we develop a 4-region macroeconomic model of the euro area and the world economy. The model (EAGLE, Euro Area and Global Economy model) is microfounded and designed for conducting quantitative policy analysis of macroeconomic interdependence across regions...

This paper studies the role of credit-supply factors in business cycle fluctuations. For this purpose, we introduce an imperfectly competitive banking sector into a DSGE model with financial frictions. Banks issue collateralized loans to both households and firms, obtain funding via deposits and...

Following the debate on the relationship between business and financial cycle rekindled in the last decade since the global financial crisis, we assess the ability of some financial indicators to track the Italian business cycle. We mostly use credit variables to detect the turning points and to...

Data demonstrate a correlation between demographic variables and financial cycle: an increase in the working-age population is associated with an expansion of the financial cycle, that is, credit growth and increased housing prices. To account for this stylized fact, this paper uses an OLG model...

In the five years 2011-2015 global trade fell short of expectations to a much larger extent than global GDP. We show that two key features of real trade flows − their high volatility and their procyclicality − are the cause behind the cyclicality of the income elasticity of trade. This...

This paper evaluates the characteristics of a Point in Time (PiT) rating approach for the estimation of firms' credit risk in terms of procyclicality. To this end I first estimate a logit model for the probability default (PD) of a set of Italian non-financial firms during the period 2006-2012,...

Since output growth volatility has negative effects on growth, poverty and welfare, especially in poorer countries, it is crucial to identify the country-specific factors that affect it. The empirical literature has focused mostly on financial development, policy distortions and globalization...