Andrea Venegoni

Because local economic development is linked to the ability to attract business, policymakers have begun to endow territories with suitable factor conditions for the enticement of new enterprises, as in the case of EU Structural Funds. We investigate this phenomenon to provide valuable policy suggestions with a dynamic factor model and a panel regression analysis with spatial effects on a database with many cross-sections (1531 municipalities) and variables (55 indicators). Results show that structural variables like technological endowment, infrastructural provision, productive structure, local taxation, human capital and innovation represent the most important drivers to stimulate business location, even at the municipal level, offering relevant cues for policymakers.

Since the 2008 Financial crisis, macroeconomic and financial markets' stabilisation policies relied mainly on monetary actions, reducing the ECB's margin of manoeuvre and calling for a major role for fiscal authorities. We investigate the impact of government decisions on financial markets for 11 Eurozone economies (from 1995 to 2021), in the very short run, using an event study, finding a positive (negative) reaction to fiscal expansion (consolidation) announcements and in the short/ medium-run, with a Bayesian TVP-FAVAR, identifying cross-country heterogeneities; stronger (weaker) public finances show a direct (indirect) relation between fiscal policies and stock prices and an indirect (direct) one with 10-year bond yield.

This paper aims at studying the mechanisms through which credit markets convey financial shocks to the real economy. To accomplish this task, we perform a comprehensive assessment of the credit market dynamics in the Euro Area, from their drivers and evolution over time to the cross-country heterogeneity of their effects. We do so by employing a Bayesian TVP-FAVAR model which adopts a novel identification strategy exploiting data on 11 Euro Area economies (Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain) between 2000:Q1 and 2018:Q4. We find that firms' financing displays higher sensitivity than households’ borrowing to credit demand and supply contractions and that, overall, credit aggregates reactions to such shocks display both time and cross-country heterogeneities. Policy-wise, this evidence highlights the need for structural interventions to better align the functioning of the banking and industrial systems in the Euro Area countries.

The estudy command proposed by Pacicco, Vena, and Venegoni (2018, Stata Journal 18: 461–476) performs event studies only for event-date clustering, that is, when the event date is common to all securities. This constitutes a relevant limitation because the vast majority of this methodology’s applications concerns studies in which the events happen on different dates for each statistical unit considered. In this article, we propose and describe a substantial update to estudy, which 1) performs event studies in the absence of event-date clustering (that is, when each security has its own event date); 2) further customizes the output by producing LATEX-formatted tables; 3) graphs the cumulative abnormal returns over a customized period set by the user; 4) makes more output data available through either the return list or Excel files; 5) allows a double possibility as input: either prices or returns; and 6) uses wildcards.

Central bank's macroprudential supervisory activities have to fulfill three distinct tasks: (i) assessing the banking system's vulnerability to exogenous adverse turbulence, (ii) evaluating the risk of systemic crisis originating from idiosyncratic shocks, and (iii) measuring financial market's sensitivity to policy stimuli. Given that macroprudential stress tests are the centerpiece of this policy approach, it is important to establish whether they are up to the task. We study how the 2011–2018 European Banking Authority stress tests affected market risk perception and show that they provided agents with valuable information on the policy stances and the vulnerabilities of the banking system, carrying out the above tasks successfully, especially the second and third tasks.

The impact of authorities’ information disclosure on social welfare and market stability has become a widely debated topic since the contribution of Morris and Shin (2002). Despite several theoretical works, this strand of literature remains void of empirical contributions. By assessing how disclosure of stress test results influences market risk perception, we provide factual evidence on how authorities’ enhanced communication affects financial markets’ stability. Our results provide empirical evidence to support Faria-e-Castro et al.’s (2017) theoretical findings, demonstrating that severe stress tests, if enacted in countries with credible fiscal capacity such as the U.S., can lead agents to revise their risk estimations downwards for all banks, notwithstanding their performance in the exercise.

Since its inception, the adequacy of the Eurozone to be an Optimal Currency Area has been questioned, and, along with it, the homogeneous transmission and impact of the monetary impulses across the member countries. We provide a comprehensive assessment of the transmission mechanism's functioning, its symmetry, impact on target variables, and evolution, addressing all the questions which have remained unanswered in the previous literature, while adding evidence on the impact of non-standard policy measures. We do so by adopting a Bayesian Time-Varying Parameters FAVAR model that fixes the flaws present in past research. The empirical analysis shows that the occurrence of the two crises significantly altered policy transmission, with both the interest rate and credit channel being consistently affected. It also shows that while they provided effective stimuli to the economies, the unconventional measures implemented were not able to fix those asymmetries. Policy-wise, our findings suggest that authorities must push towards consistent innovation on the fiscal side, while gaining more confidence with regards to the new monetary toolkit.

Regulators have been paying increasing attention to governing and steering market fluctuations, with their role in shaping the economic cycle being ever more crucial. The combined effect of the financial and sovereign debt crises, as well as the approach to the zero lower bound, has made actions even more pressing, forcing the European Central Bank to resort to unconventional instruments to revive the economies and counter deflationary pressures. By using a combined event study and panel regression methodology, we investigate whether European Monetary Union equity markets react heterogeneously to standard and non-standard European Central Bank policy innovations. Our results show that conventional policies unevenly affect financial indices in the Eurozone and, hence, are bound to generate asymmetries that reflect on real economies, while unconventional measures, albeit with different intensities, exercise a homogeneous pressure on all markets. Our evidence highlights the beneficial impact of unconventional measures and suggests that they can play a useful role even in non-crisis times.