This article surveys the literature on sovereign debt sustainability from its origins in the mid-1980s to the present, focusing on four debates. First, the shift from an "accounting based" view of debt sustainability, evaluated using government borrowing rates, to a "model based" view which uses...

In this paper, the author considers the sovereign debt in the form of one-period government bonds with default risk, which can be purchased by and traded among domestic and foreign investors. She shows that the weight assigned to the lenders' interest by the borrowing government at the time of...

Societies often rely on simple rules to restrict the size and behavior of governments. When fiscal and monetary policies are conducted by a discretionary and profligate government, I find that revenue ceilings vastly outperform debt, deficit and monetary rules, both in effectiveness at curbing...