The paper studies the transmission of monetary policy shocks in Italy, by means of a structural VAR, using a long data sample; focusing on a long sample period permits a comparison between the Italian evidence and the international literature and makes it possible to test the robustness of the...

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...