The Bank of Italy has released seven Occasional Papers covering judicial efficiency and credit, Italian investment dynamics, artificial intelligence in Economic Bulletin drafting, collective bargaining, payment stablecoins, family business succession and the 2026 Strait of Hormuz energy shock. The papers present research findings rather than new regulatory or monetary policy measures. The judicial efficiency study finds that turnover among Italian court presidents slowed growth in the duration of bankruptcy liquidation proceedings, with larger gains where incoming presidents were younger, had managerial experience or had local ties. The improvement was associated with an 8.3% relative decline in late payment risk, about 7% more short term credit within existing bank relationships and a 6.7% relative increase in new lending relationships. Separately, the collective bargaining paper finds that negotiated wages rose 61.2% in nominal terms between 2000 and 2025 but fell 1.3% in real terms, with a 5.9% real decline in private services compared with a 4.3% increase in industry. Longer renewal delays contributed to the divergence, while second level bargaining partly offset foregone increases. Research on Italian investment attributes the persistent weakness of output and investment in 2008-2019 mainly to permanent supply shocks, while the post-pandemic recovery was driven chiefly by persistent demand factors. The stablecoin paper compares European Union, United States and United Kingdom approaches, distinguishing direct central bank backing from indirect anchoring through banks and stressing that safe reserves alone do not ensure timely par convertibility. The artificial intelligence study finds that vector retrieval provided the strongest baseline for evidence-grounded Economic Bulletin drafting, while graph retrieval became reliable after technical adjustments and hybrid retrieval remained promising but did not consistently outperform vector retrieval.

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