The volume collects the essays presented at the 12th Workshop on Public Finance organised by Banca d'Italia in Perugia on 25-27 March 2010. The workshop focused on the implications for fiscal policy analysis of the 2008-09 recession, the most severe at global level since the Great Depression....

The volume collects the essays presented at the 11th Workshop on Public Finance organised by Banca d'Italia in Perugia on 26-28 March 2009. The workshop examined the issue of pension reform with the purpose of highlighting the recent analytical developments and the most relevant policy issues....

The aim of this paper is to design the optimal institutional arrangement for a monetary union. Using a two-country rational expectations model, the study analyses how the conservatism of the area-wide central bank and the penalty system for fiscal deviation (Stability and Growth Pact) should be...

We investigate the effect of electoral rules and political regimes on fiscal policy outcomes in a panel of 61 democracies from 1960 and onwards. In presidential regimes, the size of government is smaller and less responsive to income shocks, compared to parliamentary regimes. Under majoritarian...

This paper has two objectives: the first is to jointly analyse monetary and fiscal policy with a structural VAR model, evaluate the dynamic impact of policy shocks on U.S. output and prices and the contributions of these two sources to fluctuations in these variables. The second objective is to...

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...