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...

In this working paper, we decompose fiscal policy in three components: i) responsiveness, ii) persistence and iii) discretion. Using a sample of 132 countries, our results point out that fiscal policy tends to be more persistent than responding to output variations. We also found that while the...

This paper tests for nonlinear effects of asset prices on the US fiscal policy. By modeling government spending and taxes as time-varying transition probability Markovian processes (TVPMS), we find that taxes significantly adjust in a nonlinear fashion to asset prices. In particular, taxes...

We test for nonlinear effects of asset prices on the fiscal policy of three major European economies (the UK, Italy and Spain). We model primary government spending and government revenue as time-varying transition probability Markovian processes (TVPMS). We find that while in Italy fiscal...

We assess the response of fiscal policy to developments in asset markets in the US. We estimate fiscal policy rules augmented with aggregate wealth, wealth composition (i.e. financial and housing wealth) and asset prices (i.e. stock and housing prices) using two nonlinear specifications that...

This paper tests for nonlinear effects of asset prices on the US fiscal policy. By modeling government spending and taxes as time-varying transition probability (TVTP) Markovian processes, we find that taxes significantly adjust in a nonlinear fashion to asset prices. In particular, taxes...