To make the no-bailout clause credible and enhance the effectiveness of crisis assistance, a consistent institutional and legal framework is needed to ensure that private creditors contribute to crisis resolution. Getting activated as part of ESM crisis assistance, we propose a two-stage...

We compare the experience of Latin American external debt crises, in particular the one in the 80s, with the current European one. We do so with the aim of shedding some light on the needed adjustment mechanisms. We argue for the need of much larger debt relief in Europe. To address the moral...

We test the hypothesis that the government bond markets in the Eurozone are more fragile and more susceptible to self-fulfilling liquidity crises than in stand-alone countries. We find evidence that a significant part of the surge in the spreads of the PIGS countries in the Eurozone during...

We extend previous work on the sustainability of the government's intertemporal budget constraint by allowing for non-linear adjustment of the fiscal variables, conditional on the sign of budgetary disequilibria and the phase of the economic cycle. Further, our endogenously estimated threshold...

We assess the sustainability of the public finances of Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain (GIIPS), allowing for possible non-linearities in the form of threshold behavior of the fiscal authorities. We provide some evidence of fiscal sustainability when debt gets 'too high' relative to a...

In this paper we study the evolution of central banks' balance sheets in 12 advanced economies since 1900. We find that balance sheet size in most developed countries has fluctuated within rather clearly defined bands relative to output. Historically, clusters of big expansions and contractions...