* The draft reform of the European Stability Mechanism (henceforth ESM) was not approved as scheduled in the Euro Summit in December 2019 because the Italian Prime Minister was obliged to ask for a delay in the face of strong domestic opposition to the reform coming from populist parties.* It is...

This paper uses the Blanchard (1985) finite horizon model to study how taxes and government spending can be managed to stabilize aggregate demand. It is shown that tax policy cannot stabilize demand in less time than it stabilizes the public debt, but that, if government spending is the...

This paper investigates the episodes of public debt reduction in advanced economies since the Second World War. We find 30 episodes of large reductions in the public debt-to-GDP ratio. Four main approaches succeeded in lowering the debt ratio. First, after the end of WWII, high and unexpected...

This paper discusses some of the legal aspects of Collective Action Clauses (CACs) in the context of the Eurozone and then approaches the broader economic issue of why it may be useful to have more efficient CACs, such as single-limb CACs, and when and in what circumstances it may be appropriate...

This paper uses the Blanchard (1985) finite horizon model to study how taxes and government spending can be managed to stabilize aggregate demand. It is shown that tax policy cannot stabilize demand in less time than it stabilizes the public debt, but that, if government spending is the...