The paper studies forecasts of real growth rates and budget balances made by official government agencies among 33 countries. In general, the forecasts are found: (i) to have a positive average bias, (ii) to be more biased in booms, (iii) to be even more biased at the 3-year horizon than at...

This paper examines the post-war strategies of Liberia and Sierra Leone to generate revenues from their natural resources. We document the challenges faced by the government of the two countries, contrasting measures taken to address these challenges as well as the outcomes. We complement the...

Every country faces what economists call an intertemporal (across time) budget constraint, which requires that its government's future expenditures, including the servicing of its outstanding official debt, be covered by its government's future receipts when measured in present value. The...

Oil and gas development associated with shale resources has increased substantially in the United States, with important implications for local governments. These governments tend to experience increased revenue from a variety of sources, such as severance taxes distributed by the state...

In the last few years there has been an explosion in the number of papers that aim to explain what determines country risk (defined as the difference between the yield of a sovereign's bonds and the risk free rate). In this paper, we contribute to the discussion using by showing that Brazilian...

Governments in emerging markets often behave like a quot;tormented insurer,quot; trying to use non-state-contingent debt instruments to avoid cuts in payments to private agents despite large fluctuations in public revenues. In the data, average public debt-GDP ratios decline as the variability...

Resources to fight the War for Independence from Great Britain (1775-1783) were to be provided to the U.S. Congress by the individual states based on each state's population share in the united colonies. Congressional spending, however, largely flowed to where the theater of war was located....

Dynamic rational expectations models imply that the real value of debt in the hands of the public must be equal to the expected present-value of surpluses. We impose this equilibrium condition on an identified VAR and characterize the way in which the present-value support of debt varies across...

This paper shows that previous analyses of IRA-type plans have miscalculated their effect on tax revenue and therefore on national saving by ignoring their impact on corporate tax payments. Recognizing the important effect of IRA plans on corporate tax revenue changes previous conclusions about...