James Buchanan's Public Principles of Public Debt is universally associated with the claim that debt allows the cost of public activity to be shifted onto future generations. This claim treats a generation as a unitary and acting entity. While such treatment is standard fare for macro theorists...

This paper explains that James Buchanan's theory of public debt entailed more than the shifting of cost forward in time from the current generation of taxpayers to future generations of taxpayers. The possibility of such shifting is dubious, for public debt really entails a shifting of cost...

Personal debts are obligations that people establish through agreement among one another, so it is easy to understand the general objection to defaulting on debts. Can such objections be reasonably extended in robotic fashion to public debts within democratic regimes? While a common piece of...

Contents: Preface -- Part I: Public debt and individual rationality -- 1. De Viti de Marco vs. Ricardo on public debt: self-extinction or default? / Giuseppe Eusepi and Richard E. Wagner -- 2. Governing the market for sovereign bailouts / Karsten Mause -- 3. Political obligations: is debt...