Die italienische Wirtschaft, die im Durchschnitt der letzten vier Jahre nahezu stagnierte, scheint sich gegenwärtig auf einem Erholungspfad zu befinden; zum ersten Mal seit dem Jahr 2001 dürfte das Wirtschaftswachstum 2006 und 2007 deutlich über der Ein-Prozent-Rate liegen. Dazu haben die...

Im Zuge der Föderalismusreform wurden die gesetzlichen Ladenschlussbestimmungen in den meisten deutschen Bundesländern kürzlich gelockert. Dies ist ein Schritt in die richtige Richtung, um einen Anstieg von Produktivität und Wachstum im deutschen Einzelhandel zu bewirken. Allerdings birgt...

This paper studies the behaviour of Internet prices. It compares price rigidities on the Internet and in traditional brick-and-mortar stores and provides a cross-country perspective. The data set covers a broad range of items typically sold over the Internet. It includes more than 5 million...

The debate on the sustainability of public finances is closely related to the analysis of the financial and macroeconomic consequences of government debt accumulation. Focusing on the USA, Germany and Italy over the 1983-2003 period, the central issue addressed in this paper is how the...

This paper documents producer price setting in 6 countries of the euro area: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium and Portugal. It collects evidence from available studies on each of those countries and also provides new evidence. These studies use monthly producer price data. The following...

An aggregation exercise is proposed that aims at in-vestigating whether the fast average adjustment of the disaggregate inflation series of the euro area CPI translates into the slow adjustment of euro area aggregate inflation. We first estimate a dynamic factor model for 404 inflation...

We estimate the degree of ‘stickiness’ in aggregate consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption habits) for thirteen advanced economies. We find that, after controlling for measurement error, consumption growth has a high degree of auto-correlation, with a stickiness...

This paper provides new evidence on the dynamics of equity risk premia in euro area stock markets across country and industry portfolios. We develop and estimate a conditional intertemporal CAPM where returns on aggregate euro area, country and industry portfolios depend on the market risk as...

The study aims at describing productivity growth in the manufacturing sector for a selected panel of five European countries using firm-level data. The paper explores the empirical regularities of firm productivity distribution across countries. In particular, we assess the degree of persistence...