The end of the great moderation has profound implications on the assessment of fiscal sustainability. The pertinent issue goes beyond the obvious increase in the stock of public debt/GDP induced by the global recession, to include the neglected perspective that the vulnerabilities associated...

We estimate the pricing of sovereign risk for a large number of countries within and outside of Europe, before and after the global financial crisis, based on fiscal space and other economic fundamentals. We measure how accurately the model predicts CDS spreads based on fundamentals, and...

We define the notion of 'de facto fiscal space' of a country as the inverse of the outstanding public debt relative to the de facto tax base, where the latter measures the realized tax collection, averaged across several years to smooth for business cycle fluctuations. We apply this concept to...

As a share of GDP, the U.S. Federal debt held by the public exceeds 50 percent in FY2009, the highest debt ratio since 1955. Projections indicate the debt ratio may be in the 70-100 percent range within ten years. In many respects, the temptation to inflate away some of this debt burden is...

Europa leidet noch immer unter einer erdrückenden Schuldenlast. Sieben Jahre nach Beginn der Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise ringen daher zahlreiche Mitgliedstaaten der Europäischen Union um ihren fiskalpolitischen Kurs. Auf der einen Seite steht die Forderung, den begonnenen, an Strukturreformen...

Zum ersten Mal seit vier Jahrzehnten ist der Bundeshaushalt im vergangenen Haushaltsjahr 2014 ohne neue Schulden ausgekommen. Bereits ein Jahr früher als geplant konnte der Bundesfinanzminister daher zu Beginn des Jahres 2015 das Erreichen der "schwarzen Null" im Bundeshaushalt verkünden....