We develop a model with financial frictions and sovereign default risk where the maturity of public debt is allowed to be larger than one period. When the debt portfolio has longer average maturities, public debt increases less in the event of a crisis, reducing the size of the subsequent fiscal...

Recent financial crises in Europe as well as the periodic battles in the U.S. over the debt ceiling point to the importance of fiscal discipline among developed countries. This paper develops an open economy model, calibrated to the U.S. and a subset of the EMU, to evaluate the impact of various...

Following the Great Recession, U.S. government debt levels exceeded 100% of output. We develop a macroeconomic model to evaluate the role of various shocks during and after the Great Recession; labor market shocks have the greatest impact on macroeconomic activity. We then evaluate the...