High and unsustainable public debt is an economic problem at the center of many emerging and developing economies. This paper investigates, for the period 1978-2017, how the Surinamese Government reacted to changes in public debt for the period 1978-2017 and assesses if fiscal policy was...

This paper provides new evidence on the effect of debt on economic growth through two alternative methodological approaches. On the one hand, by using a panel error correction model with a sample of 130 countries between 1980 and 2020, we found evidence of the existence of a range of debt-to-GDP...

Total public debt in most emerging markets grew before and after the pandemic with a sizable share in foreign currency. Along this trend, interest payments increased even in the presence of active fiscal rules in some countries. How should debt management of public debt be set under a fiscal...

Governments can issue public debt for both good and bad reasons. The former include intertemporal tax smoothing, fiscal stimulus, and asset management. In contrast, the bad reasons, which generate higher indebtedness, are mainly associated with political cycles, rent capture, intergenerational...

Governments often pursue procyclical fiscal policies, even though they reduce voter welfare. Is this because voters actually prefer procyclical policies? The analysis in this paper exploits the first individual-level evidence from an original survey of 12,000 respondents in 8 countries across...

In this paper, we study the drivers of public debt surges across 172 countries from 1980-2021. We focus on the role of discrepancies between the annual change in public debt and the budget deficit, referred to as stock-flow adjustments (SFA). The analysis employs survival methods to model the...

This paper explores the qualitative and quantitative implications of optimal taxation in a developing economy when economic growth is endogenously determined. We differentiate this class of economies from a developed economy in two aspects: informal sector is quantitatively significant and...

We use regional variation in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009-2012) to analyze the effect of government spending on consumer spending. Our consumption data come from household-level retail purchases in Nielsen and auto purchases from Equifax credit balances. We estimate that a $1...

This paper uses state-level data to estimate the effect of federal defense spending shocks on state real activity. We find moderately strong evidence that for the average state the fiscal multiplier is larger during recessions. However, there is substantial heterogeneity across the...

This paper analyses the link between discretionary fiscal policy and interest-growth differentials (r-g). Panel regressions based on a dataset for 20 advanced countries over the years 1990-2019 reveal no evidence of a systematic linear relationship between fiscal policy and r-g. However, more...