“Safe assets” is a catch-all term for financial contracts that market participants treat as if they were risk-free. These may include government debt, AAA corporate debt, bank debt, and asset-backed securities, among others. The International Monetary Fund estimated potential safe assets at...

Using a large panel of OECD countries this paper studies the link between debt and macroeconomic stability by comparing the evolution of balance sheet aggregates and economic output in high- and lowdebt environments. While the relationship between debt and economic growth has been extensively...

How costly are sovereign debt crises? In this paper we study output losses during sovereign default and debt renegotiation episodes since 1980. In contrast to previous work, we account for the severity of default and not only for its occurrence. Specifically, we distinguish between “hard”...

This paper argues that asset price cycles have significant effects on fiscal outcomes. In particular, there is evidence of debt bias-the tendency of debt to increase over the cycle- that is significantly larger for house price cycles than stand-alone business cycles. Automatic stabilizers and...

Advanced economies borrowed substantially during the Covid recession to fund their fiscal policy. The Covid recession differed from the Great Recession in that sovereign debt markets remained calm and spreads barely responded. We study the experience of Greece, the most extreme manifestation of...

This paper studies the effects of quantitative easing on income and wealth of individual euro area households. The aggregate effects of quantitative easing are estimated in a multi-country VAR model of the four largest euro area countries, in which key variables affecting household income and...

This paper studies optimal levels of borrowing at each point of a given business cycle when default is considered a possible optimal decision. It also searches for parameters that can cause the sustainable equilibrium of different points in the business cycle to become unstable, or nonexistent....