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...

Supervisors and policy makers pay increasing attention to the possible procyclical nature of banks� behaviour. Indeed, to guarantee macro and financial stability, it is important to understand whether, and to what extent, banks are affected by the macroeconomy and second round effects...

This paper investigates the markup of price over marginal cost in Italian manufacturing branches. The approach used is an extension of Hall�s model that addresses some measurement shortcomings and theoretical limitations that may affect this class of model. The hypothesis of perfect...

In this paper we develop a mixed frequency dynamic factor model featuring stochastic shifts in the volatility of both the latent common factor and the idiosyncratic components. We take a Bayesian perspective and derive a Gibbs sampler to obtain the posterior density of the model parameters. This...

This paper compares the return to pre-crisis levels and the long-term performance of exports in the main Italian regions compared with some European regions with a similar production structure. The results show that the intensity and timing of recovery in the cyclical component of exports were...

We present a new indicator of house prices in Italy, with more extensive geographical and time coverage. The new indicator now makes it possible to analyze medium- and long-term trends with satisfactory representation of the Italian housing market. It also allows for timely updating, for prompt...

This paper investigates the business cycle properties of the euro area and computes a coincident and a leading indicator of economic activity. We accomplish this by applying the newly introduced generalized factor model to a properly constructed and harmonized data set of short term statistics...