We nowcast the economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and related lock-down measures in the UK and then analyse the distributional and budgetary effects of the estimated individual income shocks, distinguishing between the effects of automatic stabilisers and those of the emergency policy...

We develop a new methodology to nowcast the effects of the COVID-19 crisis and forecast its evolution in small, export-oriented countries. To this aim, we exploit variation in financial indexes at the industry level and relate them to the expected duration of the crisis for each industry, under...

Universal Credit (UC) was a large-scale reform of the UK welfare system reform, replacing six existing benefits. UC aimed to simplify claims and encourage more claimants into work. We identify its effect on mental well-being, treating the phased rollout from 2013-2018 as a natural experiment. We...

I develop an agent-based computational economics (ACE) model with which I evaluate the aggregate impact of labor market policies. The findings are that governmentfinanced training measures increase the outflow rate from unemployment to employment. Although the overall effect is positive this...

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, with periphery countries in the European Union even more falling behind the core countries economically, there have been quests for various kind of fiscal policies in order to revert divergence. How these policies would unfold and perform comparatively...

Agent-based simulation models are a relatively new addition to the tool-box of macroeconomists. In this chapter we introduce the Eurace@Unibi model and the research that has been done within this framework. We show how an agent-based model can be used to identify economic mechanisms and how it...