This paper analyses the effects of fiscal policies on rates of interest and wealth in the world economy. Uncertainty concerning the length of life yields an equilibrium in which private and social rates of discount differ and budget deficits exert real effects. It is shown that a current budget...

We consider public debt from a long-term historical perspective, showing how the purposes for which governments borrow have evolved over time. Periods when debt-to-GDP ratios rose explosively as a result of wars, depressions and financial crises also have a long history. Many of these episodes...

This paper analyzes the relation between public wage bills and public deficits in the OECD countries from 1995 to 2009. The paper shows that fiscal drift episodes, characterized by simultaneous increases in the GDP shares of public wage bills and budget deficits, are more frequent during booms...

We study cointegrating relationships among fiscal variables and output and use them to introduce a new measure of the government's fiscal position. In the US since World War II, we find that the primary surplus-GDP ratio and the government debt-GDP ratio are nonstationary, which invalidates...

If the U.S. is on a fiscally sustainable path, then higher U.S. government debt/output ratios should reliably predict higher future surpluses or lower real returns on Treasurys. In the post-war sample, we find no evidence for this. Neither future cash flows nor discount rates account for the...

In a deterministic overlapping-generations economy with production and physical capital, the price of debt can be positive without any budget surpluses being in the offing, because debt incorporates a rational bubble. Yet the dynamics of debt remain a function of the dynamics of the primary...

This paper proposes a tractable framework to analyze fiscal space and the dynamics of government debt, with a possibly binding zero lower bound (ZLB) constraint. Without the ZLB, a greater primary deficit unambiguously raises debt. However, debt need not explode: When R G - φ, where φ is the...

This study examines the reasons for changes in the real exchange rate between the dollar and the German mark from the beginning of the floating rate regime in 1973 through 1984. The econometric analysis focuses on the effects of anticipated structural budget deficits and monetary policy in the...

This paper offers a possible explanation for the existence of continual government budget deficits such as experienced in a number of industrialized countries in recent years. Based on the assumption that higher tax rates cause more intensive tax-aversion behavior (tax avoidance and tax...