Based on an empirical gravity model of sectoral bilateral trade, we uncover three features of bilateral trade balances. First, the difficulty of gravity models in fitting the observed level of bilateral balances is likely due to the presence of unobservable bilateral trade costs. Second, the model fit improves drastically when we focus on changes over time of the balances. Third, using a log linear approximation we show that changes in bilateral trade balances over the past two decades were driven almost entirely by changes in the same macro factors that determine countries’ aggregate balances – changes in bilateral trade costs, including tariffs, played therefore only a negligible role. This conclusion provides new support for the view that bilateral balances are, for practical purposes, not relevant to the conduct of macroeconomic policy.

Tackling the design of a mission-critical system is a rather complex task: different and quite often contrasting dimensions need to be explored and the related trade-offs need to be evaluated. Designing a mass-memory device is one of the typical issues of mission-critical applications: the whole system is expected to accomplish a high level of dependability which highly relies on the dependability provided by the mass-memory device itself. NAND flash-memories could be used for this goal: in fact on the one hand they are nonvolatile, shock-resistant and powereconomic but on the other hand they have several drawbacks (e.g., higher cost and number of erasure cycles bounded). Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) techniques could be exploited to improve dependability of flash-memory devices: in particular binary Bose and Ray-Chaudhuri (BCH) codes are a well known correcting code technique for NAND flash-memories. In spite of the importance of error correction capability several other equally critical dimensions need to be explored during the design of binary BCH codes for a flashmemory based mass-memory device. No systematic approach has so far been proposed to consider them all as a whole: as a consequence a novel design environment with a user-selectable error correction capability is aimed at supporting the design of binary BCH codes for a flash-memory based mass-memory device.

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What types of monetary and fiscal policy rules produce self-fulfilling deflationary paths that are monotonic and empirically relevant? This paper presents simple theoretical conditions that guarantee the existence of these paths in a general equilibrium model with sticky prices. These sufficient conditions are weak enough to be satisfied by most monetary and fiscal policy rules. A quantification of the model which combines a real shock à la Hayashi and Prescott (2002) with a simultaneous sunspot that deanchors inflation expectations matches the main empirical features of the Japanese deflationary process during the "lost decade". The results also highlight the key role of the assumption about the anchoring of inflation expectations for the size of fiscal multipliers and, in general, for any policy analysis.