Interest rates on public debt have for several years now fallen short of GDP growth rates in much of the Western world. In his presidential address to the AEA Blanchard argued that this implies that there are no fiscal costs to high debt (Blanchard, 2019).1 In this paper we argue that the safe...

We analyse the poisonous interaction between bank rescues, financial fragility and sovereign debt discounts. In our model balance sheet constrained financial intermediaries finance both capital expenditure of intermediate goods producers and government deficits. The financial intermediaries face...

We investigate the effectiveness of "Keynesian" fiscal stimuli when government deficits and debt rollovers are (possibly partially) financed by balance sheet constrained financial intermediaries. Because financial intermediaries operate under a leverage constraint, deficit financing of fiscal...

There is an ongoing debate about austerity and stimulus in the Euro zone. Moreover, given the fiscal and financial problems in the region, a default has appeared likely at times. In this context, this paper develops a dynamic stochastic quantitative model of sovereign default with fiscal policy,...

It is well known that rational bubbles can be sustained in balanced growth path of a deterministic economy when the return to capital r is equal to the growth rate g. When there is a lack of stores of value, bubbles can implement an efficient allocation. This paper considers a world where r...

Conventional wisdom teaches that the output response upon a fiscal expansion is higher under fixed than floating exchange rates for a small open economy. We analyse the effects of fiscal expansions using a New Keynesian model and find that this result reverses in times of sovereign default risk....