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...

Recent studies have explored the possibility that accounting for limited participation in financial markets, and in the stock market in particular, might rationalize the empirical inconsistency of the Consumption-based Capital Asset Pricing Model (C-CAPM). The rational behind this stand is that...

This paper proposes a test for the cost-based explanation of non-participation, by estimating a lower bound to the forgone gains of incomplete portfolios; these are in turn a lower bound to the costs that could rationalize non-participation in financial markets: high bounds would imply...

This paper analyses the dynamics of Italian household wealth over the 1990s and assesses the strength of the wealth effects on consumption, using as a benchmark the United States. In a period of sharply rising asset prices, Italian household net worth rose significantly, but on the whole...

This paper builds a unifying framework based on the theory of intertemporal consumption choices that brings together the limited participation-based explanation of the C-CAPM poor empirical performance and the transaction costs-based explanation of incomplete portfolios. Using the implications...

In this paper we use two complementary Italian data sources (the 1995 Istat and Bank of Italy household surveys) to generate household-specific non-durable expenditure in the Bank of Italy sample that contains relatively high-quality income data. We show that food expenditure data are of...

We use detailed data on housing prices in Italy available for a large number of years and with a fine geographical breakdown to compute capital gains and losses on the most widespread asset among consumers, housing, and inquire whether changes in housing values affect consumption. We find that...