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...

"State per capita incomes became more disperse during the contraction phase of the Great Depression, and less disperse during the recovery phase. We investigate the effects of geography, industry structure, bank failures and fiscal policies on state income growth during each phase. We find that...

This paper dwells on the Eurozone woes and addresses the origins of the transition from a fictitious boom to a painful bust by unravelling (i) the supply-side structural imbalances that formed the core-periphery economic divide, and (ii) the necessity of the periphery's sovereign debt to finance...