The paper combines the literature on financial crises in emerging markets and developing economies with that on international migrations by investigating whether the increasingly large flows of workers' remittances can help reduce the probability of current account reversals. The rationale for this stands in the great stability and low cyclicality of remittances as compared to other private capital flows: these properties, combined with the fact that remittances are cheap inflows of foreign currencies, might reduce the probability that foreign investors suddenly flee out of emerging markets and developing economies and trigger a dramatic current account adjustment. We find that remittances can indeed have such a beneficial effect. In particular, we show that a high level of remittances, as a ratio of GDP, makes the relationship between a decreasing stock of international reserves (over GDP) and a higher probability of current account crises less stringent. The same occurs, though less neatly, for the positive relationship between an increasing stock of external debt (over GDP) and the probability of current account reversals. Our results point also to a threshold effect of remittances: the mechanisms just described are, in fact, much stronger when remittances are above 3 percent of GDP.JEL codes: F32, F36, J61, O1

No abstract

This paper studies the complementarity between investment in information and communication technologies (ICT) and the related investment in human and organizational capital. Using firm-level data taken from a large sample of Italian manufacturing firms, an ICT marginal product much higher than its user cost is estimated. It is then argued that missing complementary investments may have acted as barriers to investment in ICT. Results support the conjecture that the marginal product excess over the user cost is due to those firms that did not complement their ICT investment with an increase in the human capital of their labour force and with a reorganization of the workplace.

We analyze the impact of increased import penetration from China on the dynamics of firm‐level output prices in Italy. Accounting for potential endogeneity biases we find a significant and negative causal relationship: a 0.1 percentage point higher Chinese import penetration restrains price growth by 0.17 percentage points per year. This relationship reflects a procompetitive effect induced by cheaper imports, and, thanks to the firm‐level dimension of our data, we show that it is driven by low‐productivity firms within less skill‐intensive sectors. Finally, we show that Chinese import competition also had a dampening effect on Italian overall inflation.

Bank of Italy and NBER conference. The views expressed here are our own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Bank of Italy, nor those of the National Bureau of Economic Research.NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.