Assuming the role of debt management is to provide hedging against fiscal shocks we consider three questions: i) what indicators can be used to assess the performance of debt management? ii) how well have historical debt management policies performed? and iii) how is that performance affected by...

A growing literature integrates debt management into models of optimal fiscal policy. One promising theory argues the composition of government debt should be chosen so that fluctuations in its market value offsets changes in expected future deficits. This complete market approach to debt...

A growing literature integrates theories of debt management into models of optimal fiscal policy. One promising theory argues that the composition of government debt should be chosen so that fluctuations in the market value of debt offset changes in expected future deficits. This complete market...

We study Ramsey optimal fiscal policy under incomplete markets in the case where the government issues only long bonds of maturity N 1. We find that many features of optimal policy are sensitive to the introduction of long bonds, in particular tax variability and the long-run behaviour of debt....

The aim of this paper is to test for the extent of incompleteness in the market for U.S government debt. We show that when a government pursues an optimal tax policy and issues a full set of contingent claims, the value of debt has the same or less persistence than other variables in the economy...

This paper tests for the market environment within which US fiscal policy operates, that is we test for the incompleteness of the US government bond market. We document the stochastic properties of US debt and deficits and then consider the ability of competing optimal tax models to account for...

We analyse the implications of optimal taxation for the stochastic behaviour of debt. We show that when a government pursues an optimal fiscal policy under complete markets, the value of debt has the same or less persistence than other variables in the economy and it declines in response to...