This paper explores the impact of high public debt on long-run economic growth. The analysis, based on a panel of advanced and emerging economies over almost four decades, takes into account a broad range of determinants of growth as well as various estimation issues including reverse causality...

China weathered the global financial crisis better than most, thanks to a large and timely stimulus. This stimulus, however, was mainly in the form of off-budget infrastructure spending and thus not visible in the headline fiscal data. We construct a time series for the augmented fiscal deficit...

We construct the first comprehensive dataset of contingent liability realizations in advanced and emerging markets for the period 1990-2014. We find that contingent liability realizations are a major source of fiscal distress. The average fiscal cost of a contingent liability realization is 6...