The historical record shows that financial crises are far from being a rare a phenomenon; they occur often enough to be considered part of the workings of finance capitalism. While there is no single hypothesis that can best explain all crises, the implications of the credit boom-and-bust...

Approximately two years ago, the Guido Carli Association charged a group of distinguished economists with studying various aspects of the international monetary system and proposing ways to improve it. The studies were presented at a conference in Florence, Italy, on June 19, 1998 and their...

Fiscal dominance, that is, the extent to which government deficits condition the growth of the money supply, has been the prevailing regime in Italian monetary history from the creation of the state in 1861 to the 1980s. The nature of the institutional structure linking budget deficits to...

We show that statistically and economically significant heterogeneity exists in the distance elasticity in trade gravity models. Distance elasticities critically depend on whether trading partners belong to the OECD and whether they are Christian or Islam countries

The theme of this paper is whether there was a textbook-like inflation-output tradeoff in post-WWII Italy. We estimate both standard and time-varying parameter models of the relationship between inflation and the level of real economic activity over the 1949 to 2010 period and find no evidence...