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...

Using national account data, we define corporate balance sheet adjustment episodes as periods during which major increases in non-financial corporations’ net lending/borrowing are experienced. An analysis of such episodes in Germany and Japan, and a more systematic exploration of a sample of...

I examine the transmission of expansionary U.S. monetary policy in case where developing countries-including China-peg their currencies to the dollar. I evaluate the value of the dollar peg as a fraction of consumption that households would be willing to pay for the dollar peg to remain as well...

This Paper presents a general equilibrium currency crisis model of the 'third generation', in which the possibility of currency crises is driven by the interplay between private firms' credit-constraints and nominal price rigidities. Despite our emphasis on microfoundations, the model remains...

Notwithstanding the effects of the expansive policies in the advanced economies, due to the 2008 financial crises, could raise their interest rates, generating a crowding-out effect over emerging market debt, this relation could not hold given the better fiscal position of these economies, such...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of monetary policy in four major countries in Southeast Asia by using impulse-response functions within a vector error correction model (VECM) framework. The impacts of interest rate shock on two macroeconomic variables, investment and consumption have...

This paper intends to discuss some problematic properties IS-LM and loanable funds together have when dealing with fiscal deficits. Many others have focused on its assumptions for criticism of IS-LM, but I will mainly focus on its fundamental modelling nature. To say more specifically, I will...

This paper investigates the sources of the widely noticed reduction in the volatility of American business cycles since the mid 1980s. Our analysis of reduced volatility emphasizes the sharp decline in the standard deviation of changes in real GDP, of the output gap, and of the inflation rate....

We investigate the short-term effects of fiscal adjustment on economic activity in 20 OECD countries from 1970 to 2009. We compare two approaches: the traditional approach based on changes in cyclically adjusted primary balance (CAPB) and the narrative approach based on historical records....

This paper evaluates the effects of fiscal policy on investment using a panel of OECD countries. In particular, we investigate how different types of fiscal policy affect profits and , as a result, investment. We find a sizable negative effect of public spending -- and in particular of its...