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 briefly reviews the literature on fiscal multipliers and then presents results for the Italian economy obtained by simulating a dynamic general equilibrium model that allows for the possibility (a) that the zero lower bound may be binding and (b) that the initial public debt-to-GDP...

We explain why the macroeconomic effects of shocks to inflation of the same size, but opposite sign, are not necessarily symmetric. All in all, the costs of deflation and disinflation tend to exceed those of inflation due to the presence of constraints in the economy, namely the zero lower bound...

The flattening of the Phillips curve observed in the industrial countries has been attributed to globalisation, while the traditional explanation centres on monetary policy credibility. The empirical literature is not conclusive, since macroeconomic data are affected by substantial...

The paper assesses the effects of increasing competition in the service sector in Italy which, based on cross-country comparisons, is the OECD country with the highest markups in non-manufacturing industries. We propose a two-region (Italy and the rest of the euro area) dynamic general...

We assess the short- and medium-term macroeconomic effects of competition-friendly reforms in the service sector when the monetary policy rate is stuck at the zero lower bound (ZLB) in a monetary union. We calibrate a large-scale multi-country multi-sector dynamic general equilibrium model to...

This paper analyses the macroeconomic effects of a protracted period of low and falling inflation rates when monetary policy is constrained by the zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates and the private sector is indebted in nominal terms (debt-deflation channel). In this scenario, even...

Price versus productivity indexing is considered in a model of monetary policy with wage bargaining. The wage-indexing rule is negotiated in a first stage of the game between government, union and firm.

This paper proposes a monetary policy game based on a microfounded general equilibrium model. The approach allows some key features of the policy game to be related to basic technological and preference parameters. Moreover, it shows how results are affected by the presence of non-atomistic...

The empirical literature on the transmission of monetary policy to inflation in Italy has stressed the importance of the exchange rate and, to some extent, of the demand channel; recently, the roles of inflation expectations and the fiscal situation have been emphasized. This paper uses vector...