Cet ouvrage présente, dans une perspective comparatiste et sur la longue durée, les moyens de mobilisation des ressources publiques des Etats médiévaux et modernes, dont les besoins de fonds sont accrus par les guerres. Couvrant six siècles de l'histoire de l'Europe occidentale, les...

This paper studies the impact of the state-dependent risk of a government default on the correlation of the scal balance and current account. We use a small open economy model where nonlinear risk premia arise endogenously when the government operates close to its scal limit, i.e. the maximum...

We provide empirical evidence that US financial stress shocks (US-FSSs) are an important driver for economic dynamics and fluctuations in emerging market economies (EMEs). Applying a structural vector autoregression, we analyze the international transmission of US-FSSs to eight EMEs using...

There is a growing empirical literature studying whether fiscal rules reduce borrowing costs. Nevertheless, it remains an open question whether these rules are effective genuinely or just because they mirror fiscal preferences of politicians and voters. In our analysis of European bond spreads,...

We investigate the political determinants of risk premiums which sub-national governments in Switzerland have to pay for their sovereign bond emissions. For this purpose we make use of financial market data from 288 tradable cantonal bonds in the period from 1981 to 2007. Our main focus is on...