The economic impact of digital technologies in Europe

This paper analyses the economic impact of digital technologies in Europe distinguishing between different stages/domains of the digitalization process. A set of composite Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) indicators is used for capturing the access to ICTs, the ability to use them and the digital empowerment of individuals in key social and economic domains. We argue that the mere accessibility to ICT facilities is only a pre-condition for moving towards a digitalized society, while the ‘level’ and the ‘quality’ in the use of these technologies, as well as the conditions facilitating or hampering digital empowerment, play a much more important role. Several transmission mechanisms from ICT access, usage and digital empowerment to key macro-economic variables (namely labour productivity, gross domestic product per capita, employment growth and the employment rate) are identified. The econometric evidence supports our hypotheses showing that the usage of ICT, and mostly digital empowerment, exert the major economic effects, especially on employment also favouring the inclusion of ‘disadvantaged’ groups in the labour market. We conclude that digitalization may drive productivity and employment growth and that inclusive policies may effectively contribute to bridge the gap between the most favoured and the disadvantaged parts of the population, thus helping in achieving the 2020 Europe targets.     

The effects of foreign shocks when interest rates are at zero

In a two‐country DSGE model, the effects of foreign demand shocks on the home country are greatly amplified if the home economy is constrained by the zero lower bound on policy interest rates. This result applies even to countries that are relatively closed to trade such as the United States. Departing from many of the existing closed‐economy models, the duration of the liquidity trap is determined endogenously. Adverse foreign shocks can extend the duration of the trap, implying more contractionary effects for the home country. The home economy is more vulnerable to adverse foreign shocks if the neutral rate is low—consistent with “secular stagnation”—and trade openness is high.     

Likelihood evaluation of models with occasionally binding constraints

Applied researchers interested in estimating key parameters of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models face an array of choices regarding numerical solution and estimation methods. We focus on the likelihood evaluation of models with occasionally binding constraints. We document how solution approximation errors and likelihood misspecification, related to the treatment of measurement errors, can interact and compound each other.     

Strategic trade policy: a review of the theoretical debate

This paper reviews the recent debate on strategic trade policies, whose main conclusion is that while the real world may be far from the condition of perfect competition considered by standard theory, free trade remains the best ruleofthumb policies. In the second part of the paper several issues are reviewed which suggest that the debate is far from complete. Two aspects, in particular, require closer scrutiny: (i) the implications of multiple equilibria and pathdependency phenomena in a world in which innovation activities have crucial effects on trade performance; (ii) the problems of collective action associated with the constitution of a free trade régime.     

Interpreting shocks to the relative price of investment with a two-sector model

Consumption and investment comove over the business cycle in response to shocks that permanently move the price of investment. The interpretation of these shocks has relied on standard one-sector models or on models with two or more sectors that can be aggregated. We show that the same interpretation can also be motivated with a model that captures key features of the US Input–Output Tables and cannot be aggregated into a standard one-sector model. Our alternative model yields a closer match to the empirical evidence of positive comovement for consumption and investment subject shocks that permanently move the price of investment.     

Heterogeneity, Job Creation and Unemployment Volatility

In this paper, I explore the impact of match‐specific heterogeneity at the job creation margin on business cycle fluctuations. I show that this form of heterogeneity alone does not help to amplify labor market volatility, either under full or under asymmetric information. First, I show analytically that, under full information, heterogeneity has no first‐order effect on the response of unemployment and job creation to productivity, and actually tends to dampen the response of market tightness. Then, in a series of calibrations, I show that with both full and asymmetric information, the model delivers labor market volatilities close to the representative‐agent, full‐information benchmark.     

The determinants of investment in information and communication technologies

In this paper, we assess the determinants of information and communication technology (ICT) investment at the macro-level, for a panel of 10 advanced countries, in the period 1992–2005. We investigate the idea that, since ICTs are general purpose technologies, the decision to invest in these technologies is strongly affected by the general business environment in which the investment takes place. The empirical results are consistent with this idea: facilitating factors such as changes in market regulation, amount of human capital, expenditure on R&D, and the share of the dynamic services sector in the economy, positively influence investment in ICT.     

Special Interest Groups and Trade Policy in the EU

The aim of this work is to employ theoretical and empirical analysis on the role of special interest groups in the determination of the EU trade policy. We build a two-stage game model of trade policy formation in a multisector-multicountry framework. We obtain the level of protection as a function of industry characteristics, in addition to political and economic factors at member state and European levels. The model is then tested by 2SLS estimation using data for 15 countries and 41 sectors. The econometric output suggests empirical support to model’s predictions as it highlights an important role for both national and European groups in trade policy making.      

New indicators of price competitiveness and effective exchange rates

New Indicators of Price Competitiveness und Effective Exchange Rates. - In this paper we propose new indicators of price competitiveness and effective exchange rates that provide more accurate information about the overall competitive position of a given country with respect to the traditional indices. The new methodology uses one of the so-called “superlative” index numbers that are characterized by very small approximation errors, which are of higher order than those present in the tradi-tional indices. The empirical evidence in four Italian exporting sectors show that the proposed indicators may differ from the traditional ones more than three percentage points not only in the end of the examined period, but also during the intermediate years.