The rapidly growing federal government debt has become a concern for policy makers and the public. Yet the U.S. government has seemingly unbounded access to credit at low interest rates. Historically, Treasury yields have been below the growth rate of the economy. The paper examines the...

It is widely hypothesized that anxiety and worry about an uncertain future lead to the adoption of comforting beliefs or "wishful thinking". However, there is little direct causal evidence for this effect. In our experiment, participants perform a visual pattern recog- nition task where some...

In this paper we document and examine unusual fluctuations in the G-Fund, which is one of five funds available in a voluntary federal government employee retirement savings vehicle called the Thrift Savings Plan. The G-Fund is managed as "internally" held debt by the United States Department of...

In the wake of the current crisis there has been an explosive rise in the level of the US public debt. These massive levels of public indebtedness are expected to keep growing unless there are drastic changes to existing budgetary policies. According to a recent series in the Financial Times,...