A striking feature of financial market behaviour in recent years has been the low level of price volatility over a wide range of financial assets and markets. The issue has attracted the attention of central bankers and financial regulators due to the potential implications for financial...

This paper identifies the macroeconomic factors that influence Italian equity returns and tests the stability of their relation with securities returns. In the sixteen-year period that has been analyzed the relation between stock returns and the macroeconomic factors is found to be highly...

This paper reconstructs the series of the real returns on Italian equities, bank and PO deposits and long-term government bonds from 1860 to today. In the long-run the return on shares was much higher than that on government securities and also that on bank and PO deposits. However, this summary...