Sovereign debt crises are difficult to solve. This paper studies the “holdout problem”, meaning the risk that creditors refuse to participate in a debt restructuring. We document a large variation in holdout rates, based on a comprehensive new dataset of 23 bond restructurings with external...

This paper highlights the importance of debt-related fiscal rules and derives growth-maximizing public debt ratios from a simple theoretical model. On the basis of evidence on the productivity of public capital, we estimate public debt targets that governments should try to maintain if they wish...

We construct and explore a new quarterly dataset covering crisis episodes in 40 developed countries over 1970–2010. First, we examine stylized facts of banking, debt, and currency crises. Banking turmoil was most frequent in developed economies. Using panel vector autoregression, we confirm...

We offer a theoretical framework to analyze corporate lending when loan officers must be incentivized to prospect for loans and to transmit the soft information they obtain in that process. We explore how this multi-task agency problem shapes loan officers' compensation, banks' use of soft...

For centuries, defaulting governments were immune from legal action by foreign creditors. This paper shows that this is no longer the case. Building a dataset covering four decades, we find that creditor lawsuits have become an increasingly common feature of sovereign debt markets. The legal...

We analyse the effect of shocks to housing wealth and income before and after the Great Recession. We combine datasets containing information on expenditure, income, wealth and debt in a synthetic panel to understand how household indebtedness affects the response to income and wealth shocks. We...

This paper is linked to two debates on fiscal policies: first, the implications of low interest-growth differentials for debt sustainability and, second, the reform of the EU fiscal governance framework. In both debates the choice of government debt anchor and the speed of adjustment take centre...

This paper studies spillovers among US and European sovereign yields. We provide a new method based on absolute magnitude restrictions of the impact matrix to identify the countries that were the main sources of spillovers. Despite the large size of shocks from euro area stressed countries,...

Using a pan-European dataset of 8.5 million firms, we find that firms with high debt overhang invest relatively more than otherwise similar firms if they are operating in sectors facing good global growth opportunities. At the same time, the positive impact of a marginal increase in debt on...

This paper explores a natural connection between fiscal multipliers and foreign holdings of public debt. Although fiscal expansions can raise domestic economic activity through various channels, they can also have crowding-out effects if the resources used to acquire public debt reduce domestic...