This paper investigates the effects of fiscal consolidation announcements on sovereign spreads in a panel of 21 emerging market economies during 2000-18. We construct a novel dataset using a global news database to identify the precise announcement date of fiscal consolidation actions. Our...

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, debt levels in emerging and developing economies have surged raising concerns about fiscal sustainability. Historically, negative interest-growth differentials in these countries have played a debt-stabilizing role. But is this enough to prevent countries...

We find that countries which are able to borrow at spreads that seem low given fundamentals (for example because investors take a bullish view on a country's future), are more likely to develop economic difficulties later on. We obtain this result through a two-stage procedure, where a first...

This paper investigates the determinants of fiscal policy behavior and its time-varying volatility, using panel data for a broad set of advanced and emerging market economies during the period 1990–2012. The empirical results show that discretionary fiscal policy is influenced by policy...

This paper documents the spread of fiscal rules in the developing world and investigates the relation between fiscal rules and procyclical fiscal policy. We find that, since the early 2000s, developing countries outnumbered advanced economies as users of fiscal rules. Rules were adopted either...