This paper describes George Washington's administration response to a plea for emergency war financing from French colonists who were trying to quash a slave rebellion in Haiti (then Saint Domingue). Washington bypassed Congress and authorized assistance to the French planters, hoping that...

Political violence, defined as actions taken for political purposes that harm humans, has long been a part of the international environment. While United States national and military strategy have historically focused on what appeared as the greatest threat - state versus state political...

Between 1839 and 1842 the United States suffered through an acute debt crisis. Over this period eight states and one territory defaulted, five of which outright repudiated all or parts of their debts outstanding. However, for many of those same states reentry into capital markets occurred...

This paper examines how newspaper reporting affects government bond prices during the U.S. state default of the 1840s. Using unsupervised machine learning algorithms, the paper constructs novel “fiscal information indices” for state governments based on U.S. newspapers at the time. The...

From 1865 to 1870, a crisis atmosphere hovered around the issue of the massive public debt created during the recently concluded Civil War, leading, in part, to the passage of a Constitutional Amendment ensuring the “validity of the public debt.” However, the Civil War debt crisis was not a...

Using hand-collected data on corporate bond and stock offerings, we identify the impact of government debt on corporate financing during World War I. The early twentieth century provides a unique opportunity to identify the impact of government debt on private financing because during this...

This paper describes and quantifies fiscal risk in advanced and developing economies. Forecast errors in GDP growth explain nearly half of fiscal risk in advanced economies. However, errors in growth forecasts are less important in explaining fiscal risk in low- and middle-income countries. Most...

The financial crisis of 2007-2009 led to a renewed increase in government deficits and debts in many EU countries, causing a full-fledged fiscal crisis in Greece and severe fiscal pressures in other euro-area countries. This has prompted a series of proposals for improving the fiscal framework...