At low and moderate levels of government debt, there appears to be little relation between the level of debt and its maturity. But at high levels of debt, a strong inverse relation emerges. We start the paper by documenting this inverse relation for those OECD Countries which have reached very...

The textbook optimal policy response to an increase in government debt is simple—monetary policy should actively target inflation, and fiscal policy should smooth taxes while ensuring debt sustainability. Such policy prescriptions presuppose an ability to commit. Without that ability, the...

We document that governments whose local currency debt provides them with greater hedging benefits actually borrow more in foreign currency. We introduce two features into a government's debt portfolio choice problem to explain this finding: risk-averse lenders and lack of monetary policy...

Optimal debt management can be thought of in three stages. First, if taxes are lump sum and the other conditions for Ricardian equivalence hold, then the division of government financing between debt and taxes is irrelevant, and the whole level of public debt is indeterminate from an optimal-tax...

The maturity structure of the U.S. government's outstanding debt has undergone large changes over time, at least in part because of shifts in the Treasury's debt management policy. During most of the post World War I1 period, an emphasis on short-term issues rapidly reduced the debt's average...

This paper advances the hypothesis that the world debt crisis was mainly induced by the dramatic rise of US interest rates in the first half of the eighties. It sees this rise in interest rates primarily as a result of a tight US monetary policy and excessively large investment incentives...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze sustainability issues of Japan%u2019s fiscal policy and then to discuss the debt management policy using the theoretical models and numerical studies. We also investigate the desirable coordination of fiscal and monetary authorities toward fiscal...

Historically, periods of high indebtedness have been associated with a rising incidence of default or restructuring of public and private debts. A subtle type of debt restructuring takes the form of "financial repression." Financial repression includes directed lending to government by captive...

This paper presents evidence that public debts in the advanced economies have surged in recent years to levels not recorded since the end of World War II, surpassing the heights reached during the First World War and the Great Depression. At the same time, private debt levels, particularly those...