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...

Since the adoption of flexible exchange rates, real exchange rates have been much more volatile than they were under Bretton Woods. However, the volatilities of most other macroeconomic variables have remained approximately unchanged. This poses a puzzle for standard international business cycle...

We assess the impact of oil shocks on euro-area macroeconomic variables by estimating a new-Keynesian small open economy model with Bayesian methods. Oil price is determined according to supply and demand conditions in the world oil market. We find that the impact of an increase in the price of...

We assess the global macroeconomic implications of different strategies of official reserve management by developing a large scale new-Keynesian dynamic general equilibrium model of the world economy, calibrated on the euro area, the United States, China, Japan and the rest of the world. An...

For historical and geographical reasons, the member countries of the European Monetary Union (EMU) display different degrees of external trade openness. The paper lays out a model for a currency area composed of two regions. One region is more open to trade with a third country outside the area...

The paper analyses the financial structure of the private sector in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland and assesses its implications for the monetary transmission mechanism. The financial accounts of these countries provide a picture of a private sector which is predictably financially less...

This paper uses a Factor Augmented Vector Autoregressive model to assess the macroeconomic impact of the euro-area sovereign debt crisis and the effectiveness of the European Central Bank's conventional monetary policy. First, our results show that in the countries most affected by the crisis,...

A coincidence in time between the volatility break associated with the "Great Moderation" and large changes in the pattern of conditional and unconditional correlations between output, hours and labor productivity was detected by Gal� and Gambetti (2009). We provide a novel explanation for...

I consider an economy growing along the balanced growth path that is hit by an adverse shock to its capital accumulation process. The model integrates efficiency wages due to imperfect monitoring of the quality of labour in a search and matching framework with methods of dynamic general...

Based on a structural VAR and a dynamic general equilibrium model, we provide evidence of the changes in the monetary transmission mechanism (MTM) in the European Monetary Union after the adoption of the common currency in 1999. The estimation of a Bayesian VAR over the periods before and after...