Few would dispute that sovereign defaults entail significant economic costs, including, most notably, important output losses. However, most of the evidence supporting this conventional wisdom, based on annual observations, suffers from serious measurement and identification problems. To address...

This paper shows that budget deficits account for a relatively small fraction of debt growth and that stock-flow reconciliation, which is often considered a residual entity, is one of the key determinants of debt dynamics. After having explained the importance of the stock-flow reconciliation,...