Home page - Mariarosaria Comunale

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• Comunale and Manera (2024) "The Economic Impacts and the Regulation of AI: A Review of the Academic Literature and Policy Actions ", IMF Working Paper No. 2024/65. 

• Comunale and Manera (2024): The Economic Impacts and the Regulation of AI: The State of the Art and Open Questions”, SUERF Policy Brief, July 2024.

• Comunale (2025): Andorra: Income and Its Drivers in a Long-Term Perspective, IMF Selected Issues Papers, No. 2025/053. 

Selected Publications

• A Comprehensive MacroEconomic Uncertainty Measure for the Euro Area and its Implications to COVID-19 [Data available at this link] 

This paper develops a new data-driven metric to capture MacroEconomic Uncertainty (MEU) in the euro area. The measure is constructed as the conditional volatility of the unforecastable components of a large set of time series, accounting for the features of monetary union as well as cross-country heterogeneity. The MEU shows the largest spike at the time of the COVID-19 outbreak and is noticeably different from other more financial-oriented and policy-driven uncertainty measures. It also reveals a significant increase in inflation uncertainty in 2021–2022. Our BVAR-based analysis shows that an unexpected increase in the MEU has a negative and persistent impact on the euro area’s industrial production, with the largest drop in the production of capital goods and durable consumer goods. Also, the effects are heterogeneous across member countries. Notably, the MEU shocks contribute significantly to the reduction of industrial production during the first wave of COVID-19, causing about 40–50 % of the decline in April 2020. Public debt increases in response to increased uncertainty. Finally, an increase in MEU negatively affects Emerging Europe countries, contributing the most to the decline in their economic activity during the COVID-19 period.

Authors: Mariarosaria Comunale and Anh Dinh Minh Nguyen 

Journal of International Money and Finance, Volume 157, August 2025, 103370  

• Searching for Wage Growth: Policy Responses to the “New Machine Age”

The current wave of technological revolution is changing the way policies work. This paper examines the growth and distributional implications of cuts in the corporate tax rate and public investment in infrastructure and education in a neoclassical growth model with “robot” capital (a broad definition of robots, Artificial Intelligence, computers, big data, digitalization, networks, sensors and servos). We find that incorporating robot capital into the model makes a big difference to policy outcomes: the trickle-down effects of corporate tax cuts on unskilled wages are attenuated, and the advantages of investment in infrastructure, and especially in education, are bigger. Based on our calibrations, grounded in new empirical estimates, infrastructure investment and corporate tax cuts dominate investment in education in a “traditional” economy. However, in an economy with robots, infrastructure investment dominates corporate tax cuts, while investment in education tends to produce the highest welfare gains of all. 

Authors: Andrew Berg, Edward F. Buffie, Mariarosaria Comunale, Chris Papageorgiou, Luis-Felipe Zanna 

Review of Economic Dynamics, Volume 57, July 2025, 101286  

• A panel VAR analysis of macro-financial imbalances in the EU

We investigate the interactions across current account misalignments, real effective exchange rate misalignments and financial gaps within EU countries, applying an heterogeneous Bayesian panel VAR to 27 EU members over the period 1994–2012. We find that, in non-euro area countries and euro periphery an increase in current account misalignments leads to a temporary increase in the real effective exchange rate misalignments, lowering competitiveness and thus amplifying current account fluctuations. For the core, increase in the rate or an expansion of the financial gap may help rebalancing the current account. In the central eastern European members, an increase in the real effective exchange rate misalignments may bring larger current account deficits in the medium-long run.

Author: Mariarosaria Comunale

Journal of International Money and Finance, Volume 121, March 2022.

• An empirical investigation of the relationship between trade and structural change

This paper investigates the role of international trade in explaining the decrease of the tradable sector employment share. We use an unbalanced panel of advanced and emerging economies for the period 1960–2011 from the EU-KLEMS and GGDC 10-sector databases in an Error Correction Model analysis. We show that international trade directly contributes to structural change: imports are negatively related with employment shifts to tradable sectors in particular in the long-run. By contrast, exports and shifts of employment towards tradables are positively associated. When trade is split in intermediate and final goods, we show that in the long-run the negative elasticity of structural change to import is driven by imports of intermediate goods, while the positive sign of exports is driven by exports of final goods.

Authors: Mariarosaria Comunale and Giulia Felice

International Economics, Volume 171, October 2022.

• Business cycles in the EU: a comprehensive comparison across methods

In this paper, we investigate different methods of assessing business cycles for the European Union. First, we conduct a Monte Carlo experiment using a broad spectrum of univariate trend-cycle decomposition methods. Second, we estimate the business cycles for real GDP and unemployment data from 1995 to end 2020. We found that the suite of models consisting of popular Hodrick-Prescott, Christiano-Fitzgerald and structural trend-cycle-seasonal filters are the best choice in both simulations and the real applications. Our analysis also confirms that the countries’ business cycles are synchronized with the aggregate euro area. Some differences can be found in the case of periphery and new member states, with the latter improving in terms of coherency after the global financial crisis. The German cycles are among the cyclical movements least synchronized with the aggregate euro area.

Author: Mariarosaria Comunale and Dima Celov

Business Cycles in the EU: A Comprehensive Comparison Across Methods | Emerald Insight, Essays in Honour of Fabio Canova (Advances in Econometrics, Vol. 44B), Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp. 99-146. 

*The views expressed herein are mine and should not be attributed to the IMF, its Executive Board, or its management. They do not necessarily represent the official views of the Bank of Lithuania, the ECB or the ESCB either.