This paper assembles an original panel of data from 2,500 restaurants in Italy over the 1998-2004 period. The main objective is to study whether the euro cash changeover had an impact on individual pricing behaviour, as it seems to be perceived by consumers. Although the sample is not...

This paper assembles an original panel of data from 2,500 restaurants in Italy over 1998-2004, with the objective of studying whether the euro cash changeover had an impact on individual pricing behavior, as apparently perceived by consumers, and which economic mechanisms may explain it. On the...

This paper assesses the relevance of national information in estimating the demand for euro-area M3 from three perspectives. First, we check whether national money demands can legitimately be aggregated. Second, we compare time-series and panel methods to estimate aggregate long-run...

In this paper we assess whether monetary variables convey marginal information on the state of the Italian economy, taking as a benchmark the forecasting errors generated by the quarterly model used by the Bank of Italy in the 1990s. We follow two alternative approaches. First we map monetary...

Can a strategy of targeting macro projections be the only guide for monetary policy actions, or could it cause macroeconomic instability in the face of imprecise information? The paper examines how the precision of the indicators affects determinacy in a model with partial information and an...

We assess the impact on the Italian economy of the main unconventional monetary policies adopted by the ECB in 2011-2012 (SMP, 3-year LTROs and OMTs) by following a two-step approach. We evaluate their effects on money market interest rates, government bond yields and credit availability and...

This paper reviews the main literature and evidence on the relevance of fiscal dominance in Italy in the last part of the 20th century and examines the evolution of the techniques of Treasury financing and of monetary targets. In the early 1970s budget deficits and monetary base creation were...

How are the dynamics of foreign and domestic sales correlated at the firm level? The question is relevant in that the sign of the correlation shapes the international transmission of shocks and the effects of policy measures. From a theoretical perspective, the correlation could be either zero,...

The paper argues that the traditional difficulty encountered in finding evidence on the effects of credit availability on economic activity depends on the fact that these effects are powerful but rare and vary with the cycle. The global financial crisis offers an opportunity to test this...