The study of the link between debt and growth has been full of debates, both in theory and empirics. However, there is a growing consensus that the relationship is sensitive to the level of debt. Our paper tries to address the question of non linearity in the long term relationship between...

France has a track record of persistent general government deficits, partly reflecting pro-cyclical fiscal policies in upswings. This has resulted in a quadrupling of its public debt-to-GDP ratio since the 1970s to above 80% of GDP. Reducing public debt is crucial because a high level of public...

The literature on estimating macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy requires suitable instruments to identify exogenous and unanticipated spending shocks. So far, the instrument of choice has been military build-ups. This instrument, however, largely limits the analysis to the US as few other...

A number of recent studies regress a “narratively” identified measure of a macroeconomic shock directly on an outcome variable. In this note, we argue that this approach can be viewed as the reduced-form regression of an instrumental variable approach in which the narrative time series is...

The paper attempts to empirically explore the transmission mechanism regarding the short-term impact of public debt and growth. We examine and evaluate the direct effect of higher indebtedness on economic growth for countries in the EU which are in the epicentre of the current sovereign debt...

The aim of our paper is to provide a comprehensive study of public debt in various aspects across the European Union,emphasizing the existing distinctions between the emerging and advanced economies in Europe. Using annual data ranging from 1995 to 2013 we develop investigation manifold....

In this paper, we investigate the issues regarding the stabilization of public debt and its decrease down to 60 per cent of GDP for selected European Union countries using the primary balance derived from the public debt dynamic model as a leading indicator. We find that there is a high...

This paper analyses the dynamic effects of fiscal imbalances in a given EMU member state on the borrowing costs of other countries in the euro area. The estimation of a multivariate, multi-country time series model (specifically a Global VAR, or GVAR) using quarterly data for the EMU period...

This paper constructs a narrative account of all legislated discretionary policy changes in the United Kingdom from 1945 to 2009. Following Romer and Romer (2009, 2010), evidence of the policymakers’ motivation is presented from U.K. official Budget documents together with technical notes,...