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...

Is there a relation between wage bargaining institutions and unemployment? The humpshape hypothesis�, first introduced by Calmfors and Driffill (1988), states that countries with highly centralized and highly decentralized wage bargaining processes have a superior performance in terms of...

This paper examines the recent behavior of sovereign interest rates in the euro area, focusing on the 10 year yield spreads relative to Germany for Italy and other euro area countries. Both previous analyses and the new evidence presented in the paper suggest that, in recent months, for several...

The capability of a country's public sector to provide high-quality goods and services in a cost-effective way is crucial to fostering long-term growth. In this paper we study the determinants of public service efficiency (PSE) and in particular the role of citizens' political values. Indeed, we...

In this paper we investigate the link between government debt-to-GDP ratio and real per capita income growth in Italy over 1861-2009. We model our regression analysis on a standard production function. Our results support the hypotheses of a negative relation between public debt and growth and...

This paper puts forward a comprehensive framework to model medium-to-long term public debt refinancing strategies. Essentially the framework has two main building blocks. First, a large number of strategies are generated so as to determine a wide range of potential financing plans, regardless of...

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.

The paper presents the results of a reconstruction of the Italian public debt series since national unification. Computations use today�s statistical methodology to obtain a database consistent with the national accounts. The reference sector is general government, not the state sector, as...

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.

We study the effects of fiscal policy on macroeconomic developments in Italy over the period 1982-2010 with a Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) model. We include public debt and impose the government budget constraint in the estimation. In contrast with previous research we also include...