The question addressed by this study is whether consumers remember past prices correctly. We test Italian citizens� memory for cinema prices with questionnaires distributed to moviegoers. The analysis concentrates on the memory of pre-euro prices, but the recall for a more recent period is...

The paper analyzes the short-run impact of periods of strong monetary growth on inflation dynamics for 15 industrialized economies. We find that when robust money growth is accompanied by large increases in stock and house prices and loose credit conditions, the probability of recording an...

The flattening of the Phillips curve observed in the industrial countries has been attributed to globalisation, while the traditional explanation centres on monetary policy credibility. The empirical literature is not conclusive, since macroeconomic data are affected by substantial...

This paper proposes a monetary policy game based on a microfounded general equilibrium model. The approach allows some key features of the policy game to be related to basic technological and preference parameters. Moreover, it shows how results are affected by the presence of non-atomistic...

The empirical literature on the transmission of monetary policy to inflation in Italy has stressed the importance of the exchange rate and, to some extent, of the demand channel; recently, the roles of inflation expectations and the fiscal situation have been emphasized. This paper uses vector...

This paper proposes a conceptual framework that makes it possible to investigate the effects of central bank independence, the degree of centralization of wage bargaining and the interaction between those institutional variables on the real wage, unemployment and inflation. This is done by...

The paper assesses the effects of increasing competition in the service sector in Italy which, based on cross-country comparisons, is the OECD country with the highest markups in non-manufacturing industries. We propose a two-region (Italy and the rest of the euro area) dynamic general...

This study investigates inflation perceptions in both qualitative and quantitative terms and their relationship with factors likely to affect them. This has been done in a unified framework through a survey of a representative sample of Italian consumers carried out at the end of 2006. The...

When the economy is subject to recurrent structural shifts, the monetary authority cannot credibly commit to a systematic approach to policy, since consistency between promises and actions is not easily verifiable; moreover, since agents have incomplete knowledge of the surrounding environment,...

The introduction of the euro notes and coins in the first two months of 2002 was followed by a lively debate on the alleged inflationary effects of the new currency. In Italy, as in the rest of the euro area, survey-based measures signaled a much sharper rise in inflation than measured by the...