The volume collects the essays presented at the 15th Workshop on Public Finance organised by Banca d'Italia in Perugia from 4 to 6 April 2013. The workshop focused on the link between fiscal policy and macroeconomic imbalances and comprised four sessions. The first session concentrated on the...

The global economic recovery is on course but remains weak. Many analysts and policymakers - including those from emerging markets - have recently called for international cooperation in the setting of macroeconomic policies. A global growth target has been adopted by the G20 to aid such...

The study examines the role of foreign capital and remittance inflows in the domestic savings of 63 developing countries for 1971-2010, paying attention to likely differential effects of FDI, portfolio investment, foreign aid and remittance. The conventional homogeneous panel estimates suggest...

There are two basic tools to analyse fundamental issues in dynamical macroeconomics. One of them is a model of optimal growth describing savings behaviour. The second one is the Solow-Swan model with a constant aggregate propensity to save out of income. A steady state of the dynamical economic...

Over the last 20 years, the annual average U.S. and Canadian productivity growth rates have been 2.3% and 1.3%, respectively. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we empirically document the firm size distribution and the productivity for the two countries. Second, we quantitatively...

This paper studies the interaction between capital income taxation and a means tested age pension in the context of an overlapping generations model, calibrated to the UK economy. Recent literature has suggested a rehabilitation of capital income taxation (Conesa et al. (2009)), predicated on...

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of fiscal policy by studying, using household-level data, how households respond to shifts in government spending. Our identification strategy allows us to control for time-specific aggregate effects, such as the stance of monetary policy or the...

This paper presents the novel implications of introducing price rigidities into a model of good-specific habit formation, for the response of private consumption following a positive government spending shock. With ’deep’ habits in demand, the price elasticity of demand rises after the...

In this paper, we characterize the relationship between the initial distribution of human capital and physical inheritances among individuals and the long-run distri- bution of these two variables. In a model with indivisible investment in education, we analyze how the initial distribution of...