How do policy communications on future f iscal targets af fect market expectations and beliefs about the future conduct of f iscal policy? In this paper, we develop indicators of f iscal credibility that quantify the degree to which policy announcements anchor expectations, based on the...

Adoption of fiscal rules and fiscal councils continued to increase globally over the last decades based on two new global datasets. During the pandemic, fiscal frameworks were put to test. The widespread use of escape clauses was one of the novelties in this crisis, which helped provide policy...

This note provides an overview of recent studies that have begun to investigate how differing moral perspectives shape attitudes toward tax and spending policies. Recent advances in evolutionary moral psychology and their application to survey-based economic analysis yield promising insights....

Ensuring that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are efficient and managed prudently is important for economic and social reasons. It is also crucial to contain fiscal risks and reduce the burden on taxpayers from recurrent and large bailouts. Governments need to develop stronger capacity to monitor...

Contrary to the traditional assumption of interest rates on government debt exceeding economic growth, negative interest-growth differentials have become prevalent since the global financial crisis. As these differentials are a key determinant of public debt dynamics, can we sleep more soundly,...

We analyze the US public sector balance sheet and project it forward under the assumption that current policies remain in place. We first document the history of the balance sheet and its components since World War II, with a detailed account of its evolution during and after the global...

This paper identifies leading indicators of fiscal crises based on a large sample of countries at different stages of development over 1970-2015. Our results are robust to different methodologies and sample periods. Previous literature on early warning sistems (EWS) for fiscal crises is scarce...

This paper presents a model-based fiscal Taylor rule and a toolkit to assess the fiscal stance, defined as the change in the structural primary balance. This is built on the normative buffer-stock model of the government (Fournier, 2019) which includes key channels like hysteresis,...

We construct a new, comprehensive instrument-level database of sovereign debt for 18 advanced and emerging countries over the period 1913-46. The database contains data on amounts outstanding for some 3,800 individual debt instruments as well as associated qualitative information, including...