Scale functions play a central role in the fluctuation theory of spectrally negative Levy processes and often appear in the context of martingale relations. These relations are often complicated to establish requiring excursion theory in favour of It^o calculus. The reason for the latter is that standard It^o calculus is only applicable to functions with a sufficient degree of smoothness and knowledge of the precise degree of smoothness of scale functions is seemingly incomplete. The aim of this article is to offer new results concerning properties of scale functions in relation to the smoothness of the underlying Levy measure. We place particular emphasis on spectrally negative Levy processes with a Gaussian component and processes of bounded variation. An additional motivation is the very intimate relation of scale functions to renewal functions of subordinators. The results obtained for scale functions have direct implications offering new results concerning the smoothness of such renewal functions for which there seems to be very little existing literature on this topic.
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