We examine the impact of four factors on the fiscal policies of the euro-area countries over the last two decades: the state of public finances, the European fiscal rules, cyclical conditions and general elections. We rely on information actually available to policy-makers at the time of...

Whether discretionary fiscal policies in industrialized countries act counter- or pro-cyclically and whether their reaction is symmetric or asymmetric over the cycle are still largely unsettled questions. This uncertainty remains even when attention is restricted to euro-area countries, where...

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...

We study the effects of fiscal policy on macroeconomic developments in Italy over the period 1982-2010 with a Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) model. We include public debt and impose the government budget constraint in the estimation. In contrast with previous research we also include...

In this paper we study the effects of fiscal policies on current consumption, distinguishing between Keynesian effects (KE), due to changes in current disposable income, and non-Keynesian effects (NE), due to expected changes in future disposable income. The literature has argued that permanent...

The role of movements in real rates in explaining the relationship between long and short-term interest rates is explored using a model of optimal government debt management.

Exploiting the analogy with the private provision of a public good, this paper studies debt restructuring with an arbitrary number of creditors using mechanism design.

This paper proposes a signaling model of fiscal stabilizations that offers a new perspective on why governments deviate from optimal tax smoothing. In our model, dependable -but not fully credible- governments have an incentive to tighten the fiscal regime when the signaling effect on credit...