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 behaviour of the fiscal authorities. We provide some evidence of fiscal sustainability when debt gets "too high" relative to a...

This paper investigates the impact of banking prudential regulation on sovereign risk. We show that prudential regulation reduces sovereign risk and induces governments to spend more. As a result, countries with tight prudential regulation have lower primary budget balances and accumulate more...

The paper analyses the linkages from financial developments to public finances. It maps and discusses the transmission channels to fiscal variables. These channels include asset prices, financing conditions, balance sheets of banks, non-banks and central banks and international linkages. The...

We examine fiscal adjustment episodes in 24 OECD countries in order to find how austerity affects debt and growth, and whether the choice of fiscal instrument matters for the results. Influential existing studies argue that spending cuts are more likely to successfully reduce debt and enhance...

We extend previous literature on fiscal policy sustainability by introducing non-linear fiscal reaction functions with endogenously estimated state-varying thresholds to capture the behaviour of fiscal policy authorities during "good" and "bad" times. These thresholds vary with the level of...

We investigate the extent to which the intensity of political competition moderates the governance issues that arise in relation to Canada’s fiscal structure. By fiscal structure we mean three distinct but interrelated fiscal dimensions of the state: financial stability, long run size and...

We study the impact of a government spending shock on the distribution of income and wealth between cohorts in a dynamic stochastic Overlapping Generations model with two types of households, Ricardian households and rule-of-thumb consumers. We demonstrate that an unexpected increase in...

We test whether adverse changes to banks' market valuations during the financial and sovereign debt crises, and the associated increase in banks'cost of funding, affected firms' real decisions. Using new data linking over 3,000 non-financial Italian firms to their bank(s), we find that increases...

We analyze domestic, foreign, and central banks holdings of public debt for 31 countries for the period of 1989-2022, applying panel regressions and quantile analysis. We conclude that an increase in sovereign risk raises the share of domestic banks' portfolio of public debt and reduces the...

Using a DSGE model with nominal wage rigidity, we investigate two scenarios for the Italian economy. The first considers sustained policy commitment to reform. The results indicate the possibility of 'growing out of bad initial conditions', if fiscal consolidation is combined with a program for...