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This paper studies how and why households adjust their spending, saving, and borrowing in response to transitory income shocks. We leverage new large-scale survey data to first quantitatively assess households' intertemporal marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) and deleverage (MPDs) (the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014512045
The fall in the U.S. public debt/GDP ratio from 106% in 1946 to 23% in 1974 is often attributed to high rates of economic growth. This paper examines the roles of three other factors: primary budget surpluses, surprise inflation, and pegged interest rates before the Fed-Treasury Accord of 1951....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014337810
How should governments structure primary sovereign bond markets when investors face asymmetric uncertainty about default risk and total demand? Standard protocols either use uniform prices for all investors, or price discriminate based on bid prices ("pay as bid"). Uniform pricing encourages...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10015361492
We develop a unified framework for optimally managing public portfolios for a class of macro-finance models that include widely-used specifications for households' risk and liquidity preferences, market structures for financial assets, and trading frictions. An optimal portfolio hedges...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013388857
How reliable are public debt statistics? This paper quantifies the magnitude, characteristics, and timing of hidden debt by tracking ex post data revisions across a comprehensive new database of more than 50 vintages of World Bank debt statistics. In a sample of debt data covering 146 countries...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10015072889
This essay discusses the reasons for and implications of the decline in real interest rates around the world over the past several decades. It suggests that the decline in interest rates is largely explicable from trends in saving, growth, and markups. In this environment, greater government...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013210052
The European Central Bank is unique in setting monetary policy for several sovereign states with heterogeneous debt levels and different maturity structures. The monetary-fiscal nexus is central to the functioning of the euro area. We focus on one particular aspect of that nexus, the effect the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013537713
Even allowing for substantial uncertainty regarding projections, current US fiscal policies are almost certainly unsustainable. Therefore, policymakers must decide when and in what ways to change policies. Changing policies sooner rather than later would put debt on a lower trajectory and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10015409782
more foreign-currency debt. We propose that monetary policy credibility explains the currency composition of sovereign debt … and nominal bond risks in the presence of risk-averse investors. In our model, low credibility governments inflate during … inflation, investors require risk premia on nominal debt, making nominal debt issuance costly for low credibility governments …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012456087
We propose a continuous time model of nominal debt and investigate the role of inflation credibility in the potential … punishment of default. With high inflation credibility, which can be interpreted as joining a monetary union or issuing foreign … currency debt, debt is effectively real. By contrast, with low inflation credibility, sovereign debt is nominal and in a debt …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012459147