The purpose of the present paper is to examine theoretically and empirically how the maturity structure of government debt is affected by changes in its main macroeconomic determining factors. We organize our investigation around a maturity-structure model for Greece in which the optimal...

We analyze the sustainability of public finances in the 16 states (Laender) of the Federal Republic of Germany using an unprecedentedly comprehensive fiscal dataset covering the period from 1950 to 2011 for West German Laender and from 1991 to 2011 for East German Laender. As we apply unit root...

Using an unbalanced panel of 27 OECD countries over the period 1970-2011, I examine whether electoral motives influenced creative accounting. Governments engage in "below-the-line" operations, such as transactions in financial assets, that do not show up in the deficit figures but give rise to...

In this paper we analyze the sustainability of public finances in the states (Laender) of the Federal Republic of Germany using an unprecedentedly comprehensive fiscal dataset for the time period from 1950 to 2011 for West German Laender and 1991 to 2011 for East German Laender, respectively. In...

In 2009, just before the full outbreak of the global financial crisis, Olivier Blanchard (2009) published an article giving a favourable appraisal of the state of macroeconomics. He came to this verdict on the basis that, after a long period of fierce theoretical debate, the discipline had...

Germany introduced a new fiscal rule, the ‘debt brake’, after the Global Financial Crisis and since then experienced a strong decline in its public debt to GDP ratio until the coronavirus pandemic struck. The past ten years and the reaction to the current crisis in Germany illustrate the...

The euro area sovereign debt crisis has highlighted the importance of reducing public debt levels and building up sufficient fiscal buffers during normal and good times. It has also reaffirmed the need for a thorough debt sustainability analysis (DSA) to act as a warning system for national...

This paper contains an econometric analysis using country level panel data of 23 OECD countries for the period 1990 - 2000, extending existing empirical work, and more specifically work on the impact of privatization on public deficit, the impact on public debt and the impact on other...

With the announcement to intervene on financial markets to restore the monetary transmission mechanism, the ECB has attenuated the pressure of the markets on the endangered peripheral countries of the Eurozone. Critics argue that by eliminating the markets’ disciplining interest mechanism,...

The aim of the article is to investigate the fiscal determinants of stock-flow adjustment (SFA). Previous literature suggests that SFA may be used strategically to reduce budget deficit and public debt. As such, SFA impairs fiscal transparency and may endanger fiscal sustainability. Therefore,...