The authors study the implications of fiscal policy behaviour for sovereign risk in a framework that determines a country's fiscal limit, the point at which, for economic or political reasons, taxes and spending can no longer adjust to stabilize debt. A real business cycle model maps the...

"Monetary policy decisions tend to be based on systematic analysis of alternative policy choices and their associated macroeconomic impacts: this is science. Fiscal policy choices, in contrast, spring from unsystematic speculation, grounded more in politics than economics: this is alchemy. In...