Unlike the crisis years of 2007-2009 (when the insolvency of large banks was a major problem), the current round of the global financial crisis has fiscal origins. Almost all developed countries suffer from an excessive public debt burden that has been built up over the last two decades or more....

Der Euro ist ein intensiv diskutiertes Thema, sowohl in der Wissenschaft als auch in der Politik. Während die einen mit ihm eine glorreiche Zukunft Europas prophezeien, betrachten ihn andere als Übel, das den alten Kontinent ins Verderben ziehen wird. Die vorliegende Arbeit geht der Frage...

We present an analytically tractable two-country New Open Economy Macroeconomics model of a currency union featuring an overlapping gen- erations structure of the Blanchard (1985)-Yaari (1965) type. It enables us to study the transmission and spillover effects of a wider range of fiscal shocks...

We present a two-country New Open Economy Macroeconomics model of a currency union featuring an overlapping generations structure of the Blanchard (1985)-Yaari (1965) type as well as monopolistic frictions and staggered adjustment in the goods and labor market. We allow for public investment and...

On 5-6 September 2012 SUERF held its 30th Colloquium “States, Banks, and the Financing of the Economy” at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium. All the chapters in this publication discuss from different...

This paper studies how distributional and electoral concerns shape sovereign default incentives within a quantitative model of sovereign debt with heterogeneous agents and non-linear income taxation. The small open economy is characterized by a two-party system in which the left-wing party has a...

The pressures on fiscal consolidation have mounted dramatically in the wake of the Greek and then the 'contagion' crisis which followed it (across the so-called 'weakest links' Portugal, Spain, Italy, Ireland). It led to the setting-up of the 750 billion euro stabilisation package widely seen as...

This paper investigates the existence of threshold effects in the relationship between public debt and economic growth in Nigeria using quarterly data. Generally, we found empirical support for an inverted U-shape relationship between public debt types and economic growth. For total public debt...

Episodes of debt accumulation have been a recurrent feature of the global economy over the past fifty years. Since 2010, emerging and developing economies have experienced another wave of historically large and rapid debt accumulation. Similar past debt buildups have often ended in widespread...

In economic discussions, currency board systems are frequently described as arrangements with self-binding character to the monetary authorities by their strict rules and establishments by law. Hard pegs and especially currency boards are often seen as remedies to overcome economic and financial...