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...

This paper has two objectives: the first is to jointly analyse monetary and fiscal policy with a structural VAR model, evaluate the dynamic impact of policy shocks on U.S. output and prices and the contributions of these two sources to fluctuations in these variables. The second objective is to...

This paper reviews the main macroeconomic trends and the debate on policy priorities in Italy since the end of the Nineties. In the decade up to the outbreak of the global crisis (1998-2007), in Italy the reform process came to a virtual standstill; this is partly due to the fragmentation of the...

Estimates of the real term structure for the euro area implied by French index-linked bonds are obtained by means of a smoothing spline methodology. The real term structure allows computation of the constant-maturity inflation compensation, which is compared with the surveyed inflation...

This paper uses the celebrated no-arbitrage affine Gaussian term structure model applied to index-linked and standard government bonds to derive expected inflation rates and inflation risk premia, in the euro area and in the US. Maximum likelihood estimates show that the model describes the...

In this paper we consider several time-varying volatility and/or heavy-tailed models to explain the dynamics of return time series and to fit the volatility smile for exchange-traded options where the underlying is the main �Borsa Italiana� stock index. Given observed prices for the...

We study the one-dimensional Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) processes with marginal law given by the tempered stable and tempered infinitely divisible distributions proposed by Rosinski (2007) and Bianchi et al. (2010b), respectively. In general, the use of non-Gaussian OU processes is impeded by...

In this paper we conduct an empirical analysis of daily log-returns of Italian open-end mutual funds and their respective benchmarks in the period from February 2007 to June 2013. First, we estimate the classical normal-based model on the log-returns of a large set of funds. Then we compare it...

We develop a dynamic multivariate default model for a portfolio of credit-risky assets in which default times are modelled as random variables with possibly different marginal distributions, and L�vy subordinators are used to model the dependence among default times. In particular, we...

The no-arbitrage affine Gaussian term structure model is used to analyse the impact of macroeconomic surprises on the nominal and the real term structure in the euro area and in the United States. We find that nominal rates are affected by surprises in economic growth, the labour market and the...