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...

By allowing median voter�s location and preferred policy to change over time, a variety of redistributive policies results in the long-run with no unique relationship to inequality. Single outcome depends on the interaction between the pure economic structure and policy action in...

We propose a portfolio selection model based on a class of monotone preferences that coincide with mean-variance preferences on their domain of monotonicity, but differ where mean-variance preferences fail to be monotone and are therefore not economically meaningful. The functional associated to...

Survey data attract considerable interest as timely and reliable series for assessing the state of the economy. We investigate the relationship between the manufacturing PMI and the Index of Industrial Production (IPI) for Italy, with a special focus on the effects of the latest crisis. The...

We introduce a two-country no-arbitrage term-structure model to analyse the joint dynamics of bond yields, macroeconomic variables, and the exchange rate. The model allows to understand how exogenous shocks to the exchange rate affect the yield curves, how bond yields co-move in different...

In this paper we present a coincident indicator for the Italian economy, Ita-coin. We construct a multivariate filter based on a broad information set, whose dimension is reduced by the Generalized Dynamic Factor Model (GDFM) approach proposed by Forni et al. (2002). A regression based on the...

We study the dynamics of risk premiums on the German bond market, employing no-arbitrage term-structure models with both observable and unobservable state variables, recently popularized by Ang and Piazzesi (2003). We conduct a specification analisys based on a new canonical representation for...

This paper investigates whether a public sector premium exists after controlling for observable characteristics and for additional motivations, other than monetary, that may induce workers to prefer employment in the public sector. We study the entire conditional wage distribution on Italian...

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...