Fausto Pacicco

Since macro-prudential stress tests have become the main instruments of the supervisory authorities' toolkit, the debate on the effect of their results disclosure inflamed. Our work aims at providing a framework that, via a dynamic estimation of the betas, allows to observe the impact of the new information flow on the stability of the banking system. What we find is that, contrary to literature wisdom, almost all banks betas decrease, as the transparency shock contributes to an overall systemic risk drop.

Financial markets vest an important role both in conveying monetary policy innovations to the real economy and in shaping business cycle's fluctuations. Hence, it becomes crucial to assess whether the ECB is able to wield homogeneous reactions in the main Eurozone stock markets and to quell their turbulences. The empirical analysis shows that conventional policy rate shifts affect unevenly the equity indices of the countries analysed, generating asymmetries between their business cycles. Moreover, the ECB stance proved unable to weather the storm and trigger an economic recovery. This calls for a refinement of ECB conduct and justifies the extensive employment of unconventional measures to revive the economy.

The literature on the evaluation of how the well-being is measured is full of different contributions, ranging from the subjective measure, to the batch of indicators approach, to the provision of synthetic objective indexes. However, up to date, there is still a lack of such measures on micro-territorial level, i.e. on town-by-town basis. This paper, thanks to the statistic platform 100% Lombardia, aims to develop such indexes, named WIT (Well-being Index for Towns), using a cluster analysis, a Bayesian dynamic factor model and a Panel-FAVARX.