In this paper we discuss fiscal and monetary policy issues facing heavily-indebted poor countries (HIPCs) who receive debt reduction via the enhanced HIPC initiative. This debt relief program is distinguished from previous ones by its conditionality: freed resources must be used for poverty...

We identify the major public debt overhang episodes in the advanced economies since the early 1800s, characterized by public debt to GDP levels exceeding 90% for at least five years. Consistent with Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) and other more recent research, we find that public debt overhang...

Using a recursive empirical model of the real interest rate, GDP growth, and the primary government deficit in the U.S., I solve for the ergodic distribution of the debt/GDP ratio. If such a distribution exists, the government is satisfying its intertemporal budget constraint. One key finding is...

A planner sets a lump sum transfer and a linear tax on labor income in an economy with incomplete markets, heterogeneous agents, and aggregate shocks. The planner's concerns about redistribution impart a welfare cost to fluctuating transfers. The distribution of net asset holdings across agents...

This paper studies the international propagation of sovereign debt default. We posit a two-country economy where capital constrained banks grant loans to firms and invest in bonds issued by the domestic and the foreign government. The model economy is calibrated to data from Europe, with the two...

We propose a clientele-based model of the yield curve and optimal maturity structure of government debt. Clienteles are generations of agents at different lifecycle stages in an overlapping-generations economy. An optimal maturity structure exists in the absence of distortionary taxes and...

We revisit the issue of fiscal procyclicality in commodity-rich nations -commodity republics in the nomenclature of this paper. Since commodity prices are plausibly a main driver of fiscal policy outcomes in these countries, we focus on the behavior of fiscal variables across the commodity...

This paper studies the interaction of government debt and financial markets. Both markets are fragile: excessively responsive to fundamentals and prone to strategic uncertainty. This interaction, termed a ʽdiabolic loopʼ, is driven by government willingness to bail out banks and the resulting...

According to the Chamley-Judd result, capital should not be taxed in the long run. In this paper, we overturn this conclusion, showing that it does not follow from the very models used to derive them. For the model in Judd (1985), we prove that the long run tax on capital is positive and...

The European debt crisis shares features of the historical episodes of outright default on domestic public debt identified by Reinhart and Rogoff (2008) as a forgotten research subject. This paper proposes a theory of domestic sovereign default in which a government chooses debt and default...