Financial cycles, credit networks and macroeconomic fluctuations: multi-scale stochastic models and wavelet analysis

This project focuses on the macroeconomics of financial cycles. Usually defined in terms of self-reinforcing interactions between perceptions of value and risk, attitudes towards risk and financing constraints, which translate into booms followed by bust, the recent empirical literature has recurred to two approaches \u2013 turning point analysis and frequency-based filters - applied to measures of credit and asset prices to pose a number of stylized facts. First, financial cycles tend to display a greater amplitude and a lower frequency in comparison to business cycles, with peaks associated with systemic crises. Second, financial cycles depend on policy regimes and on the pace of financial innovations, leading to a wide cross-country heterogeneity and a time-varying degree of global synchronization. The latter point is clearly related to the structural transformations occurred in financial systems over the last three decades, like the cumulative integration of traditional banking with capital market developments and the increasing degree of interconnections among financial institutions. However, to date very little is known about determinants and mechanisms behind financial cycles, and on how they interact with business cycles and medium-to-long-run macroeconomic performance. In this project we plan to research along three dimensions: i) measurement issues, in order to provide a comprehensive assessment of the evolution of co-movements between financial and real variables across a sample of financial developed countries, both over time and at different frequencies; ii) theoretical issues, aimed at exploring under what circumstances the network of interconnections among financial intermediaries and between intermediaries and non-financial borrowers might evolve cyclically, contributing this way to regulate the incentives agents have in taking risks, and to set the importance of credit and financial frictions in accounting for time-varying misallocations of resources; iii) policy issues, given the role assigned by international supervisory bodies to a proper characterization and knowledge of the financial cycle as a prerequisite for the macro-prudential regulation of banks, and the scope of monetary policy in promoting financial stability in addition to the typical mandate of price stability. Our task requires the employment of a new approach to macroeconomic analysis, diverse analytical tools and one unifying economic principle. As regards the latter, our focal point is the notion of risk externalities, across financial institutions and between the financial sector and the real economy. The set of tools we plan to employ spans from wavelets methods to multi-scale models in continuous time, and from strategic network formation to agent-based computational techniques. All these tools are instrumental in building and estimating macroeconomic models characterized by interrelated markets operating at different time scales

Rapporto 2013 sullo stato della ricerca scientifica all’Università di Trieste

Università degli Studi di Trieste Commissione per la Valutazione della ricerca "Rapporto 2013 sullo stato della ricerca scientifica all’Università di Trieste. Primo esercizio di valutazione delle pubblicazioni scientifiche 2008-2011", Trieste, EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 201

Gli approcci culturalisti allo studio del ceto medio - elementi per una definizione operativa

Sin dagli albori del dibattito sociologico sulle classi, il ceto medio è stato definito "in negativo", per ciò che non è, in quanto "mondo di mezzo" tra borghesia e classe operaia. Gli approcci tradizionali, come è noto, fanno riferimento all'occupazione come criterio di stratificazione primario o esclusivo. Con Bourdieu, tuttavia, si inaugura una stagione di studi che indagano le pratiche culturali che chi si posiziona, appunto, nel ceto medio mette in atto per definire le "persone come noi". Questo paper si propone di tratteggiare una mappa degli approcci teorici che si collocano in questo filone di studi. A tal fine, presenta i risultati di un'analisi dei riferimenti bibliografici di 150 articoli pubblicati in riviste scientifiche tra il 2001 e il 2019, presenti in Web of Science. La conclusione cui esso giunge è che, nella pluralità di approcci "culturalisti", il concetto di classe assume un carattere marcatamente relazionale, che si esprime nelle lotte simboliche che si consumano nelle pratiche di distinzione

Dispositivi della visione e falsificazione del reale ne "La invención de Morel" di Adolfo Bioy Casares

open1The essay focuses on the relationship between images, desire and reality in La invención de Morel (1940) by Adolfo Bioy Casares. The novel prefigures the evolution of contemporary society, where images proliferate outside the screens, transforming the whole reality into a virtual, widespread screen: the fictive penetrates into the real and the real into the fictive, to the point that defining borders among them become impossible. Far from being mere forms of representation, images become man’s rivals: they can seduce human beings, replace them, and even kill them. In Bioy’s novel, images are the ambiguous “simulacra”—in Jean Baudrillard’s terms—of a disrupting “dissimulation of reality”.Articolo in rivista scientifica di classe A.openLuigi MarfèMarfe', Luig