We study the sustainability of public debt in a closed production economy where a benevolent government chooses fiscal policies, including haircuts on its outstanding debt, in a discretionary manner. Government bonds are held by domestic agents to smooth consumption over time and because they...

High public debt combined with low capacities of the state to raise taxes and to support markets can put even developed countries into turmoil. However, the existing political economy literature of state capacity, pioneered by Besley and Persson (2009), does not investigate the interaction of...

We examine monetary policy options for a small open economy where sovereign default might occur due to intertemporal insolvency. Under interest rate policy and floating exchange rates the equilibrium is indetermined. Under a fixed exchange rate the equilibrium is uniquely determined and...

We study Irelandś inheritance of debt following its secession from the United Kingdom at the beginning of the twentieth century. Exploiting structural differences in bonds guaranteed by the UK and Irish governments, we can identify perceived uncertainty about fiscal responsibility in the...

In this paper I assess the ability of econometric and machine learning techniques to predict fiscal crises out of sample. I show that the econometric approaches used in many policy applications cannot outperform a simple heuristic rule of thumb. Machine learning techniques (elastic net, random...