Governments around the world have gone on a massive fiscal expansion in response to the Covid crisis, increasing government debt to levels not seen in 75 years. How will this debt be repaid? What role do conventional and unconventional monetary policy play? We investigate debt sustainability in...

This paper studies the public debt implications of a class of Aiyagari (1994)-Bewley (1977)-Huggett (1993) (ABH) models of incomplete insurance in which agents face a near-zero probability of a highly adverse outcome. In generic models of this kind, there exists a public debt bubble, so that the...

We investigate the implications of extra-normal government spending under the COVID-19 pandemic for commercial bank lending growth between 2019Q4 and 2020Q4 in a large sample of over 3000 banks from 71 countries. We control for pre-pandemic structural factors, bank characteristics and government...

This paper proposes a tractable framework to analyze fiscal space and the dynamics of government debt, with a possibly binding zero lower bound (ZLB) constraint. Without the ZLB, a greater primary deficit unambiguously raises debt. However, debt need not explode: When R G - φ, where φ is the...

Recent developments in public finance in the analysis of dynamic government debt policies have emphasized effects on the distribution of real resources across generations. At the same time, macroeconomists have emphasized the importance of the length of the time horizon over which agents...

This paper analyses the effects of fiscal policies on rates of interest and wealth in the world economy. Uncertainty concerning the length of life yields an equilibrium in which private and social rates of discount differ and budget deficits exert real effects. It is shown that a current budget...

Many issues in macroeconomics, such as the level of the steady state interest rate, or the dynamic effects of government deficit finance, depend crucially on the horizon of economic agents. This paper develops a simple analytical model in which such issues can be examined and in which the...

This paper considers that possibility that expected future government deficits directly affect economic decisions, in particular the decisions of the Federal Reserve. Some evidence is presented in Section II that indicates that the behavior of the Fed may be influenced by expected future...

This paper deals with the relation between government spending and real rates of interest as well as with the international transmission of fiscal policies.The dependence of the patterns of consumption in one country on fiscal policiesin the rest of the world are examined. For this purpose a...

An earlier paper by the author investigated the quantitative implications, for the effectiveness of fiscal and monetary policies, of a model treating the determination of long-term interest rates by explicitly imposing the market clearing equilibrium condition that the quantity of bonds issued...