We construct a small open economy model of endogenous growth with public capital accumulation and examine how a debt policy rule under which the government gradually reduces its debt-GDP ratio to a target level affects macroeconomic stability, fiscal sustainability, and welfare. We obtain the...

In a monetary union, the interaction between several governments and a single central bank is plagued by several sources of deficit bias, including common pool problems. Each government has strong preferences over local spending and taxation but suffers only part of the costs of union-wide...

Most studies on the relationship between public debt and economic growth implicitly assume homogeneous debt effects across their samples. We - in accordance with recent literature - challenge this view and state that there likely is a great deal of cross-country heterogeneity in that...

This study provides empirical evidence that the costs of austerity crucially depend on the level of private indebtedness. In particular, fiscal consolidations lead to severe contractions when implemented in high private debt states. Contrary, fiscal consolidations have no significant effect on...

Large and growing levels of public debt in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and the Euro Area raise new interest in the cross-country effects of a large open economy's deficits. The authors consider a dynamic optimising model with costly tax collection and exogenously given public...

We consider a dynamic general equilibrium model with collective wage bargaining and investigate how unemployment dynamics are affected by two types of budgetary policies. In line with traditional reasoning, a balanced-budget rule amplifies fluctuations in the short run, whereas an...

This paper examines the issue of the Greek public debt from different perspectives. We provide a historical discussion of the accumulation of Greece's public debt since the 1960s and the role of public debt in the recent crisis. We show that the austerity imposed since 2010 has been unsuccessful...

The sustainability of the Nigerian fiscal deficit along with the role of the dynamics of government revenues and spending in adjusting the size of the deficit is examined using annual data from 1961 to 2014. After allowing for structural breaks, the study finds evidence of a cointegration...

This paper examines the question whether joining EMU or the breach of the Stability and Growth Pact in 2003 had an impact on the deficit policy of member states. The empirical analysis gives no hint for an alteration of deficit policy after having joined EMU or after having breached the Pact in...

This policy brief reexamines the effects of the Greek austerity experiment on its economy via a counterfactual analysis. We combine the fiscal multipliers from the meta regression analysis in Gechert and Rannenberg (2014) to the fiscal consolidation measures that have been implemented in Greece...