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...

In the 1970s, large increases in the price of oil were associated with sharp decreases in output and large increases in inflation. In the 2000s, even larger increases in the price of oil were associated with much milder movements in output and inflation. Using a structural VAR approach,...

In this paper I estimate the impact of changes in real and financial wealth � proxied by house and stock market prices � on private consumption for a panel of sixteen emerging economies in Asia and Central and Eastern Europe. Using recent econometric techniques for heterogeneous...

This paper proposes a comparative analysis of the main macroeconomic aggregates (both real and credit aggregates), and the monetary policy response during the most severe recessions experienced by the Italian economy. This descriptive study focuses mainly on the last forty years, a period for...

In this paper, I investigate the characteristics of house price dynamics for a sample of 16 emerging economies from Asia and Central and Eastern Europe, over the period 1995-2011. Linking housing valuations to a set of conventional fundamental determinants � relative to both the supply and...

A two-country model that incorporates many features proposed in the New Open Economy Macroeconomics literature is developed in order to replicate the volatility of the real exchange rate and its disconnect with macroeconomic variables. The model is estimated using data for the euro area and 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...

Changes in social security laws and regulations which took place in the late sixties and early seventies apparently weakened the link between contributions and benefits permitting a time path of aggregate consumption in excess of what would have occured in the absence of such changes. In this...

We probe the scope for reacting to house prices in simple and implementable monetary policy rules, using a New Keynesian model with a housing sector and financial frictions on the household side. We show that the social welfare maximizing monetary policy rule features a reaction to house price...