Academic research and policy makers in the Euro area are currently concerned with the threat of debt deflation and secular stagnation in Europe. Empirical evidence seems to suggest that secular stagnation and debt deflation in the Euro area may be rather slowly developing. Yet what appears as...

The recent financial and sovereign debt crises around the world have sparked a growing literature on models and empirical estimates of defaultable debt. Frequently households and firms come under default threat, local governments can default, and recently sovereign default threats were eminent...