Over-borrowing and financial stress has recently become an important issue in macroeconomic and policy discussions in the US as well as in the EU. In this paper we study two regimes of financial stress. In a regime of high financial stress, stress shocks can have large and persistent impacts on...

We show that in the EU there were diverse causes for the sovereign debt crisis. Yet, fiscal austerity was hastily imposed assuming that the multiplier would be weak and fiscal consolidation could quickly be achieved. Yet, it turned out that fiscal consolidation is state dependent: It is...

This project studies and models key macroeconomic variables and their impact on sovereign risk premia across some European economies and developed countries. The sample is divided into groups of countries in the European Monetary Union (EMU), the 'standalone' economies that are outside the EMU...