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...

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...

This paper examines the relationship between international production and exports for a number of countries. In the theoretical literature the relationship between direct investment and trade is not certain apriori: some works emphasize their complementarity, others their reciprocal...

Current account (CA) dispersion within European Union (EU) member states has been increasing progressively since the 1990s. Interestingly, the persistent deficits in many peripheral countries have not been accompanied by a significant growth process able to stimulate a log run rebalancing as...

The work of Ghironi and Melitz (2005) is at the frontier of international real business cycle (IRBC) models with heterogeneous firms. In their model, the dynamic behaviour of real marginal costs is puzzling: a positive technology shock hitting the home country makes it permanently less...

For historical and geographical reasons, the member countries of the European Monetary Union (EMU) display different degrees of external trade openness. The paper lays out a model for a currency area composed of two regions. One region is more open to trade with a third country outside the area...

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...