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...

I estimate a two-equation system on the euro-Czech koruna exchange rate and order flow at hourly frequency within the framework of Evans-Lyons (JME 2002). I use transac-tions data from the Reuters Spot Matching market in the second half of 2002, during which the Czech National Bank conducted...

This paper investigates the relationship between exchange rate fluctuations and the investment decisions of a sample of Italian manufacturing firms. The results support the view that a depreciation of the exchange rate has a positive effect on investment through the revenue channel, and a...

This paper investigates the relationship between exchange rate fluctuations and the investment decisions of a sample of Italian manufacturing firms. The results support the view that a depreciation of the exchange rate has a positive effect on investment through the revenue channel, and a...

Why do some states default on their debt more often than others? We argue that sovereign default is the outcome of a political struggle among different groups of citizens. It is more likely to happen if: (i) domestic debt-holders are relatively weak; (ii) the the political costs of the financial...

This paper develops an early warning system for sovereign debt crises, broadly defined as episodes of outright default, failure of a country to be current on external obligations and substantial access to IMF resources. It estimates a multinomial logit model that makes it possible to...

The role of movements in real rates in explaining the relationship between long and short-term interest rates is explored using a model of optimal government debt management.

In this paper we assess the impact of unexpected shocks to real interest rates and GDP on government budgets for nine European Union countries. Shocks are estimated as onestep-ahead forecast errors arising from a recursive bivariate VAR model. To assess the impact on the budgets we use available...

A standard result of optimal debt management models is that in a world of complete markets, where policymakers can make credible announcements, the maturity structure of government debt is totally irrelevant. This paper investigates the role of debt maturity in a very simple context in which...

Exploiting the analogy with the private provision of a public good, this paper studies debt restructuring with an arbitrary number of creditors using mechanism design.