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 confront five stylized facts related to sovereign default: 1) the presence of serial defaulters; 2) the prevalence of partial over complete default; 3) the counter-cyclicality of default; 4) non-linearity of sovereign spreads; and 5) heterogeneous outcomes among serial defaulters. In a model...

In this paper we analyse the interaction of fiscal rules and fiscal space. We find strong evidence for fiscal rules being associated with higher fiscal space. Furthermore, the analysis shows that countries with more fiscal space tend to have higher discretionary expenditures, but that this...

Unstable government debt dynamics can typically be corrected by various fiscal instruments, like appropriate adjustments in government spending, public transfers, or taxes. This paper investigates properties of state-contingent debt targeting rules which link stabilizing budgetary adjustments...

The paper analyses the drivers of sovereign risk for 31 advanced and emerging economies during the European sovereign debt crisis. It shows that a deterioration in countries' fundamentals and fundamentals contagion – a sharp rise in the sensitivity of financial markets to fundamentals – are...

Does an inflation conservative central bank agrave; la Rogoff (1985) remain desirable in a setting with endogenous fiscal policy? To provide an answer we study monetary and fiscal policy games without commitment in a dynamic stochastic sticky price economy with monopolistic distortions. Monetary...

This paper develops a small New Keynesian model with capital accumulation and government debt dynamics. The paper discusses the design of simple monetary and fiscal policy rules consistent with determinate equilibrium dynamics in the absence of Ricardian equivalence. Under this assumption,...

Regarding a prospective reform of the European Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) it seems rather consensual that a simplified framework should take account of the prevailing macroeconomic context and enhance the balancing of sustainability and stabilisation considerations. This paper provides...

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...

How does the need to preserve government debt sustainability affect the optimal monetary and fiscal policy response to a liquidity trap? To provide an answer, we employ a small stochastic New Keynesian model with a zero bound on nominal interest rates and characterize optimal time-consistent...