It is a great pleasure for me to introduce this special issue in honor of Clifford Wymer. This special issue (which has been jointly edited by Giovanni Di Bartolomeo, Daniela Federici, and Enrico Saltari) is a fitting tribute to a great scholar. We all know him well, so there is no need for me to eulogize him.

This paper builds a stylized simple sticky-price New Keynesian model where agents' beliefs are not homogeneous. We assume that agents choose optimal plans while considering forecasts of macroeconomic conditions over an infinite horizon. A fraction of them (boundedly rational agents) use heuristics to forecast macroeconomic variables over an infinite horizon. In our framework, we study optimal policies consistent with a second-order approximation of the policy objective from the consumers' utility function, assuming that the steady state is not distorted.

In this paper, we present a nonlinear model where the information and communication technology (ICT) sector is endogenized. In the model, there are two intermediate goods: a traditional good produced by capital and labor and the ICT good produced by innovative capital and skilled labor. The final good is obtained combining the two intermediate goods. The model is specified and estimated as continuous-time general disequilibrium framework. Our main results are the following. We find that the elasticity of substitution of the aggregate sector has a value intermediate between that of the ICT sector and that of the traditional sector, indicating that the input complementarity is tighter in the former than in the latter. Moreover, in all the sectors elasticities are well below 1. As for the traditional sector, whose share is predominant in the production of the final good, the input complementarity helps explain most of the labor share decline of Italian economy as a consequence of the slowdown in the growth of capital intensity. In the ICT sector, technological progress, both in the form of capital augmenting and capital bias, showed a decline over the sample period with an obvious negative consequence on the global evolution of the technical progress. The results about the dynamics of the two intermediate sectors allow to interpret the “Italian paradox” of an industrial structure marked by an increasing weight of the traditional sector and the difficulties encountered by the Italian economy in exiting from its actual worst recession since the 1930s.

Recent papers point to the problem that inflation-targeting models do not as of yet consider financial market stability that can considerably derail inflation-targeting monetary policy, implying significant nonzero crisis probabilities that could come along with large negative output and employment gaps. Credit flows and the instability of credit appear to be at the root of the financial instability problem. On the other hand, some authors recently questioned whether a too early and too strong leaning against the wind policy by central banks might have higher costs than benefits in terms of output and employment losses. In our paper, we include in an inflation targeting model a financial stabilization goal. In contrast to infinite horizon and two-period models, we propose a finite horizon model. The model is solved by using a new global solution algorithm, called Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC), exploring stabilizing/destabilizing effects of price and nonprice (credit volume) drivers of the output gap, inflation, and credit flows. We substantiate the theoretical part of the paper by approaching the subject empirically, relying to that end on a regime-switching structural vector autoregressive (VAR) for the euro area. The empirical model contains standard macroeconomic variables along with credit flows and loan interest rates, the central bank policy rate, and European Central Bank (ECB) balance sheet variables. The regime-switching feature of the model is meant to capture the state-dependent relationship between the variables, with specific nonlinearities having direct counterparts in the theoretical model. Based on a sign restriction methodology, we explore conventional and unconventional monetary policy shocks, loan supply, and demand shocks, under different regime assumptions to reveal the state-dependent effects of both interest rate and volume-based policies. The empirical results are used as guidance for the calibration of the theoretical model variants.

While credit cards provide transactions services, as do currency and demand deposits, credit cards have never been included in measures of the money supply. The reason is accounting conventions, which do not permit adding liabilities, such as credit card balances, to assets, such as money. However, economic aggregation theory and index number theory measure service flows and are based on microeconomic theory, not accounting. Barnett et al. derived the aggregation and index number theory needed to measure the joint services of credit cards and money. They derived and applied the theory under the assumption of risk neutrality. But since credit card interest rates are high and volatile, risk aversion may not be negligible. We extend the theory by removing the assumption of risk neutrality to permit risk aversion in the decision of the representative consumer.