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...

We implement a new approach for the identification of "news shocks" about future technology. In a VAR featuring a measure of aggregate technology and several forward-looking variables, we identify the news shock as the shock orthogonal to technology innovations that best explains future...

Robert Solow has criticized our 2006 Journal of Economic Perspectives essay describing "Modern Macroeconomics in Practice." Solow eloquently voices the commonly heard complaint that too much macroeconomic work today starts with a model with a single type of agent. We argue that modern...

This paper considers the case for and against 'the treasury view' - the idea that in a downturn, government spending has no effect on economic activity or unemployment. The report covers three areas: the evidence for expansionary fiscal contraction – the idea that somehow cutting budget...

This paper makes the case for a third stimulus package to in the face of economic indicators signaling that the economy is in a deeper downturn than was expected based on previous projections. Specifically, the report calls for an employer tax-credit for extending health care coverage and...

Some economic observers argue “structural unemployment” has increased in the wake of the Great Recession, but in this paper we find little support for either of two arguments that suggest that structural unemployment has been on the rise. The first argument focuses on the large increase in...

Short-term collateralized debt, such as demand deposits and money market instruments - private money, is efficient if agents are willing to lend without producing costly information about the collateral backing the debt. When the economy relies on such informationally-insensitive debt, firms...

We examine the effect of rising U.S. house prices on borrowing and spending from 2002 to 2006. There is strong heterogeneity in the marginal propensity to borrow and spend. Households in low income zip codes aggressively liquefy home equity when house prices rise, and they increase spending...

In 1946 the economist Arthur Burns defined a business cycle as a period of expansion occurring about the same time in many economic activities, followed by similar general recessions, contractions and revivals, which merge into the expansion phase of the next cycle. Cycles may take from one year...

The new economic projections from the Congressional Budget Office show the economy remaining well below its potential level of output until 2014. The projections show the unemployment rate averaging 10.2 percent in 2010 and gradually edging down to the long-term sustainable rate of 4.8 percent...