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The LHC cold mass manufacturing is a challenging project that has required a strong effort in terms of engineering and man power to assess the required high quality level. The production of LHC dipoles in ASG Superconductors is completed almost on time, thus keeping the average losses well below 5%

This paper analyzes the international transmission and welfare implications of productivity gains and changes in market size when macroeconomic adjustment occurs both along the intensive margin of trade (changes in the relative price of existing varieties of tradable goods) and the extensive margin (creation and destruction of varieties). We draw a distinction between productivity gains that enhance manufacturing efficiency and gains that lower the cost of firms' entry and of product differentiation. Countries with lower manufacturing costs have higher GDP but supply their products at lower international prices. Instead, countries with lower entry costs supply a larger array of goods at improved terms of trade. Output growth driven by demographic expansions, as well as government spending, is associated with an improvement in international relative prices and firms' entry. While trade liberalization may result in a smaller array of goods available to consumers, efficiency gains from deeper economic integration benefit consumers via lower goods prices. The international transmission mechanism and the welfare spillovers vary under different asset market structures, depending on trade costs, the elasticity of labor supply, and consumers' taste for varieties. Keywords: Trade; Productivity; Terms of trade; Taste for variety JEL classification: F41 ; F32

A baseline general equilibrium model of optimal monetary policy among interdependent economies with monopolistic firms and nominal rigidities is presented.

A variant of the IMF's Global Economic Model that is suitable to analyze macroeconomic dynamics in open economies is developed. The model is used to assess the effectiveness of Taylor rules and inflation-forecast-based (IFB) rules in stabilizing variability in output and inflation.

This paper investigates the impact of fluctuations in the return to human capital on the composition of international asset portfolios. We adopt a continuous-time VAR model of international portfolio choice which allows for intertemporal interactions between wage rates and capital returns. Applying the model to a large set of OECD countries, our findings account for an average bias of about 30 percentage points toward domestic securities. The results are quantitatively similar both when a 'fundamentals' approach is adopted to compute the returns to domestic capital from data on aggregate operating surpluses, and when data on financial returns are used to evaluate the overall payoff of a claim on a country's productive resources. Keywords: Return to human capital; International asset portfolio; Continuous-time VAR model; Wages; Profits