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 offers a comprehensive comparison of the structure of banking and financial markets in the euro area. Based on this, several hypotheses about the role of banks in monetary policy transmission are developed. Many of the predictions that have been proposed for the U.S. are deemed...

Switching costs are a key determinant of market performance. This paper tests their existence in the corporate loan market in which they are likely to play a central role because of the complexity of contracts and informational problems. Using very detailed data at bank-firm level on four...

We examine the determinants of entry into Italian local banking markets during the period 1991-2002 and build a simple model in which the probability of branching in a new market depends on the features of both the local market and the potential entrant. Our econometric findings show that, all...

Is deregulation sufficient to grant free entry in local credit markets? Economic theory suggests at least two ways in which asymmetric information between incumbents and entrants can work as an endogenous barrier to entry. First, entrants� pool of applicants contains a larger share of...

In this paper I estimate the impact of changes in real and financial wealth � proxied by house and stock market prices � on private consumption for a panel of sixteen emerging economies in Asia and Central and Eastern Europe. Using recent econometric techniques for heterogeneous...

We use a macroeconomic euro area model with a bank sector to study the pro-cyclical effect of the capital regulation, focusing on the extra pro-cyclicality induced by Basel II over Basel I. Our results suggest that this incremental effect is modest. We also find that regulators could offset the...

The ability of a two-sector model to quantify the contribution of the housing market to business fluctuations is investigated using U.S. data and Bayesian methods. The estimated model, which contains nominal and real rigidities and collateral constraints, displays the following features: first,...

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...

In this paper we present an overview of theoretical and empirical contributions exploring the inter-linkages between financial factors and real economic activity. We first revisit the main theoretical approaches that allow financial frictions to be embedded into general equilibrium models, and...