The paper proposes an operational definition of safe public debt levels and discusses various concrete approaches to calculate them. A public debt level is considered safe if it is associated with a low probability of reaching levels likely to generate significant economic costs within a given...

We analyze how concerns for model misspecification on the part of international lenders affect the desirability of issuing state-contingent debt instruments in a standard sovereign default model à la Eaton and Gersovitz (1981). We show that for the commonly used threshold state-contingent bond...

In the paper we show that, most of the time, smooth reduction in the debt ratio is optimal for tax-smoothing purposes when fiscal risks are asymmetric, with large debt-augmenting shocks more likely than commensurate debt reducing shocks. Asymmetric risks are a feature of 200 years of data for...

This chapter reviews the literature on intergenerational risk sharing (IRS). We explore to what extent and how a market economy with an appropriate institutional setting can replicate a social planner's solution in models with increasing levels of complexity. In particular, we do this for...

What determines the recovery of sovereign bond holders in the face of a credit event? This paper studies empirical determinants for sovereign recovery risk. Guided by theoretically backed hypotheses we use a sample of 102 past restructurings and empirically test the relation between haircut...

We provide a new measure of sovereign country risk exposure to global sovereign tail risk (SCRE) based on information incorporated in 5-year sovereign CDS spreads. Our panel regressions with quarterly data from 53 countries show that macro risks have strong explanatory power for SCRE. After...

The paper aims to present some risks and consequences of the indebtedness of an economy. The article is based on the results of a research project and it describes the negative effects of a high level of indebtedness of an economy, the elements that influence the risks of an economy's...

This paper considers the relationship between tax competition and growth in an endogenous growth model where there are stochastic shocks to productivity, and capital taxes fund a public good which may be for final consumption or an infrastructure input. Absent stochastic shocks, decentralized...

We explore the benefits of intergenerational risk-sharing through both private funded pensions and via the public debt. We use a multi-period overlapping generations model with a PAYG pension pillar, a funded pension pillar and a government. Shocks are smoothed via the public debt and variations...