This paper examines the emergence of economic clubs and its coherence with the European commitments by analysing business cycle comovements in six industrialised economies, which are pooled into four different clusters. Starting from turning points chronologies, a binary measure of association...

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...

Using data from the Italian Institute of Statistics, I examine the cyclical properties of three labor inputs - regular employees, regular self-employed, and underground workers. Results support the widespread view that, in Italy, the shadow employment functions as an improper tool for increasing...

This paper investigates the underlying sources of the Italian industrial sector fluctuations. It concentrates in particular on the role of different shocks on the manufacturing business cycle. To this end, it considers both domestic shocks (to hours worked and to technology) and external shocks...

A factor based approach is often used to build Composite Indicators (CI) from qualitative data stemming from Business and Consumers Survey (BCS). Bruno and Malgarini (2002) and Gayer and Genet (2006) have used factor analysis to synthesize the information contained in the balances of the various...

The aim of this paper is to empirically investigate the cyclical features of the main Italian Manufacturing Business Survey indicators using time and frequency domain techniques. In particular, it analyzes the dynamics of each survey variable over time and with respect to different benchmark...