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...

This paper provides an empirical exploration of the interaction between fiscal policy, monetary policy, exchange rates, and external balances as well as their impacts on real economic growth and inflation for the BRICS countries. A panel VAR model is employed to assess the dynamic relationships....

Halving the US current account deficit as a share of GDP is likely to impose a burden of $2,350 per capita on the United States, which explains why US policymakers want to postpone adjustment. The rest of the world relies on the economic stimulus of a widening US external deficit, which explains...

We revisit Obstfeld and Rogoff's (1995) results on exchange rate dynamics in a two-country, monetary model with incomplete asset markets, stationary net foreign assets, and endogenous nominal interest rate setting a la Taylor (1993). Under flexible prices, the nominal exchange rate exhibits a...

A number of empirical studies have reported the result that exchange rates show a delayed overshooting in response to monetary policy shocks. This result is puzzling. Economic theory suggests that the overshooting should occur immediately after the shock, not with a delay. This paper uses a...

Results of empirical research have revealed a characteristic hump-shaped effect of monetary policy shocks on output: the effect builds to a peak after several months and then gradually dies out. We analyze, in the context of a "new open economy macroeconomics" model, factors that imply a...

Recent empirical studies have highlighted that valuation effects associated with fluctuations of nominal exchange rates are one of the key components that drive the behaviour of the net foreign assets position of a country. In this paper, we propose a two-country overlapping-generations model of...

The recent global financial tsunami has had economic consequences that have not been witnessed since the Great Depression. But while some countries suffered a particularly large contraction in economic activity on top of a system-wide banking and currency collapse, others came off relatively...

The plethora of currency crises around the world has fueled many theories on the causes of speculative attacks. The first-generation models focus on fiscal problems. The second-generation models emphasize countercyclical policies and self-fulfilling crises. In the 1990s, models pinpoint to...

The U.S. current account deficit is unsustainable and will need to fall by half as a share of GDP in coming years. The adjustment process will necessarily involve (1) substantial further real effective depreciation of the U.S. dollar, (2) slowing of U.S. demand growth below potential output...