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Pivoting on the idea that differences in production and financial systems may affect monetary transmission mechanisms, a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model is built and the effectiveness of monetary policy on the real economy in the Italian regions in the period 2000–16 is tested, also taking interaction effects into account. The results show that regional gross domestic product responds positively, but asymmetrically to an expansionary monetary policy, while prices fall in the short run. It is also shown that short- and long-term interest rates react in accordance with theory.

Finding a non-academic job in line with both doctoral graduates’ degree and acquired know-how can be difficult because of insufficient demand for R&D skills in public administration and private enterprise and/or because of the lack of matching between the existing demand and the Ph.D. holders’ specialization. The aim of this paper is to test whether migrating from some regions may improve job-education matching in Italy. The econometric strategy takes into account Ph.D. holders’ selfselection into non-academic employment as well as the endogeneity of the migration choice. Results demonstrate that migration seems to facilitate the possibility of finding better job opportunities. More specifically, only migration within the regions of the centre and north of Italy seems to improve jobeducation matching.

Supposing that parties in EMU countries behave differently from other EU parties in supporting the integration process, this paper explores, simultaneously, the role of economic variables as well as voters’ attitudes and party characteristics in the EU positioning of European national political parties. Empirical analysis relies on CHES data for 84 parties in 14 European countries in the period 1999-2010. Fractional logistic regression results show that public Euroscepticism drives parties positioning only in the EU countries. Ideological extremism is, instead, negatively related to European integration only in the Eurozone. EU positioning is responsive to larger parties in all the countries. Among economic determinants, party support for the EU is conditioned only by price stability in Eurozone countries, while all the economic determinants affect non-Eurozone parties.

In this paper we test the presence of β-convergence among Italian regions, in the period 1980-2003, in presence of a trend break in the series following a new approach (Vogelsang and Tomljanovich, 2002). The break year is considered either known (1992) and endogenously estimated from the data. When we consider a known trend break date model the results evidence the presence of a convergence process for most of the Italian regions in the considered period. The outcome relative to the unknown break date model, on the contrary, strongly depend on the econometric model used to estimate the β-convergence.