Welcome to my webpage!
I am Michele Mancini, Senior Economist at the ECB (currently on leave from the Bank of Italy).
My research interests are: international trade, global value chains analysis, productivity estimation.
My IDEAS – Google Scholar
Contact me: michele.mancini (at) ecb.europa.eu
new research
- Global Value Chains and COVID: evidence on Italian firms, with G. Giovannetti, E. Marvasi, G. Vannelli, Rivista di Politica Economica, 2020/2. [
paper] [
slides]
The pandemic shock has revived the debate on the possibility that the reshoring of production previously localized abroad has been contributing to a broader deglobalization process. The results of the Bank of Italy’s ‘Business Outlook Survey of Industrial and Service Firms’, carried out in September and October 2020, suggest that no widespread reshoring is under way in Italy, in line with the evidence for other advanced economies. Furthermore, the findings show that internationalized firms seem to have dealt better with the pandemic crisis than those who only operate in the domestic market.
My other Covid-19 policy notes: Fighting Covid-19: measuring the restrictiveness of government policies (link); Update on the evolution of the Covid-19 pandemic (link, only in Italian).
- Trade and Economic Activity: Non-Linear Modelling and Forecasting, with A. Borin and A. Gazzani (draft available soon)
Motivated by the increasing role of trade in global economic developments, this paper derives novel econometric methods to forecast global trade by exploiting the relationship between economic activity and trade itself. Consistently with a simple theoretical framework, we empirically document that trade and economic activity are strongly linked, but their relation changes along the business cycle – the stronger the cycle the larger their elasticity. We find that such cyclicality depends on the low-frequency components of trade and GDP and a linear relationship is obtained by filtering those components out. These findings are exploited in an out-of-sample real time forecasting exercise that map GDP forecasts, historically significantly more accurate than projections on global trade, into world trade forecast. By both modelling explicitly the cyclical trade-GDP relationship as well as linearizing it, we obtain predictions vividly more accurate than naive linear models, nearly halving the forecast error of the IMF.
- Check icio website here! icio is an user-friendly Stata tool to compute measures of GVC participation and trade in value-added.
New version with ADB MRIO up to 2019 available!
A full database (country/sector/time) of trade in value-added and GVC participation measures can be found 
here. Please check the read me file in the zip folder.
- Check the World Bank World Development Report 2020 on Global Value Chains here.
– GVC participation measures used in the Report follow the methodology from our works (Borin and Mancini, 2015, 2019).
– GVC indicators in the report can be computed in Stata with icio. See this help guide to replicate WDR2020 GVC measures.
new PUBLICATIONS
- icio – Economic Analysis with Inter-Country Input-Output tables.
Stata Journal, 2021, forthcoming.
with F. Belotti and A. Borin.
– WP version: Policy Research Working Paper 9156. Washington, D.C.: World Bank [link] [slides] icio measures trade in value-added and participation in GVCs of countries and sectors by exploiting Inter-Country Input-Output (ICIO) tables. It provides decompositions of aggregate, bilateral and sectoral exports and imports according to the source and the destination of their value-added content. The command allows to work directly with the most popular ICIO tables – WIOD (Timmer et al. 2015), TIVA (OECD), EORA (Lenzen et al. 2013); in addition, any other user-provided ICIO table can be loaded. icio encompasses the most relevant measures of value-added in exports and imports at different level of aggregation. It follows closely the accounting framework presented in Borin and Mancini (2019), which – in turn – extends, refines and reconciles the other main contributions in this strand of the literature. As different empirical questions call for distinct accounting methods, icio is designed to be flexible also in this respect.
- EU transfers and euroscepticism: can’t buy me love?
Economic Policy, 2020. [link]
with A. Borin and E. Macchi.
The future of an institution, such as the European Union, ultimately depends on people’s support. This paper investigates whether EU redistributive policies have improved public attitudes towards European integration, both in terms of public opinion and political preferences. We focus on Cohesion Policy funds, whose allocation allows us to single out these effects by means of a regression discontinuity approach. The results show that EU transfers have mitigated the rise of Eurosceptical attitudes and reduced political consensus for anti-EU parties. The effects are homogeneous across different socio-economic groups, including the most disadvantaged ones. The improvement in public support for the EU does not appear to be exclusively a spillover of the positive economic effect of funding; we show evidence suggesting the existence of a ‘reciprocity-effect’ channel, i.e. citizens in recipient regions recognize the beneficial role of the EU as the source of funding
Michele Mancini economist global value chains international trade
Michele Mancini economist global value chains international trade icio
