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...

Whether a central bank should share with the public its views about the future evolution of short term interest rates is an unresolved issue. Disclosing this information might allow a more precise control of market expectations and a more effective achievement of the ultimate goals of the...

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...

In many VARs, monetary policy shocks are identified with the least squares residuals from a regression of the federal funds rate on an assortment of variables. Such regressions appear to be structurally fragile and are at odds with other evidence on the nature of the Fed's reaction function;...