My research is in applied time series, business cycle and monetary policy. I have pioneered, with several co-authors, econometric methods for analysing a large number of time series: dynamic factor models, shrinkage methods, Bayesian vector auto-regressions (see Research section on this page). Later on I have used some of these ideas to develop a framework for Now-Casting

My work on monetary policy has focused on documenting monetary analysis at the European Central Bank and, more recently, on understanding the effect of its policies during the crisis. I am also working on the interaction between monetary policy and banks’ behaviour.

What is Now-Casting?

Now-casting is defined as the prediction of the present, the very near future and the very recent past. More broadly we can define it as the exercise of reading, through the lenses of a model, the flow of data releases in real time. The term is a contraction for now and forecasting and has been used for a long-time in meteorology. The first paper which used this term in economics and provided a methodology to implement it is Giannone, Reichlin, and Small, 2008.