The Bank of Italy has released eight Occasional Papers covering euro area investment, zombie firms, corporate bond pricing in the artificial intelligence era, synthetic firm data, fintech financing, immigration, post-pandemic inflation in Italy and the supervisory assessment of geopolitical risk. The research provides new evidence on macroeconomic developments, financial innovation and risks relevant to supervision and capital allocation. The investment study finds that euro area downturns are synchronized but recoveries differ markedly across countries, with economic activity the main driver and financial conditions particularly important for construction. A separate paper finds that healthy Italian exporters in areas with more employment tied up in zombie firms respond less to positive foreign-demand shocks, especially when hiring white-collar workers and among smaller firms. Research on U.S. corporate bonds estimates that hyperscalers obtained materially lower issuance yields after ChatGPT’s launch, while software firms faced less favorable pricing, indicating that credit markets differentiated between AI infrastructure providers and businesses exposed to disruption. The immigration paper associates non-OECD immigration, particularly high-skilled inflows, with stronger labor productivity, investment, human capital and total factor productivity growth, while cautioning that its cross-country estimates are suggestive rather than causal. The fintech study describes a global sector dominated by small firms and increasingly oriented toward business-to-business services, with venture capital supporting partnerships and acquisitions by incumbent financial institutions as the market consolidates. Research on synthetic data finds that tree-based and Gaussian copula methods reproduce key properties of the Bank of Italy’s unbalanced firm panel, but create sizeable re-identification risk that controlled measurement error can reduce while preserving analytical usefulness.
2026-09-17Bank of Italy
Bank of Italy releases eight studies on investment, fintech, artificial intelligence and prudential risk
The Bank of Italy released eight Occasional Papers spanning investment, fintech, artificial intelligence, immigration, synthetic data, inflation and prudential risk. Key findings include weaker hiring by healthy firms in areas with more zombie employment, lower post-ChatGPT bond yields for hyperscalers and investment-led productivity gains associated with high-skilled immigration. Other studies examine euro area investment divergence, fintech consolidation and methods to reduce disclosure risk in synthetic firm data.