The paper presents the results of a reconstruction of the Italian public debt series since national unification. Computations use today's statistical methodology to obtain a database consistent with the national accounts. The reference sector is general government, not the state sector, as in...

The sovereign debt problems in European countries have increased the interest in fiscal watchdogs. This paper discusses the world's oldest fiscal watchdog, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB). CPB was founded directly after World War II. It has built a reputation of...

The positions of British and German economists on public debt in the long 19th century differed substantially from each other. While British classical economists regarded any public debt as ruinous for the country, German economists promoted debt accumulation for productivity-enhancing public...

In this paper we investigate the link between government debt-to-GDP ratio and real per capita income growth in Italy over 1861-2009. We model our regression analysis on a standard production function. Our results support the hypotheses of a negative relation between public debt and growth and...

Contingent sovereign debt can create important welfare gains. Nonetheless, there is almost no issuance today. Using hand-collected archival data, we examine the first known case of large-scale use of state-contingent sovereign debt in history. Philip II of Spain entered into hundreds of...

The financial crisis that has been wreaking havoc in markets across the world since August 2007 had its origins in an asset price bubble that interacted with new kinds of financial innovations that masked risk; with companies that failed to follow their own risk management procedures; and with...

One of the most popular investment anecdotes relates how Isaac Newton, after cashing in some large early gains, staked his fortune on the success of the South Sea Company of 1720 and lost heavily in the ensuing crash. However, this tale is based on only a few scraps of hard evidence, some of...

This paper puts the original Reinhart-Rogoff dataset, made public by Herndon et al. (2013), to a formal econometric test to pin down debt thresholds endogenously. We show that the nonlinear relation from debt to growth is not very robust. Taken with a pinch of salt, our results suggest, however,...

The economics profession seems to increasingly endorse the existence of a strongly negative nonlinear effect of public debt on economic growth. Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) were the first to point out that a public debt-to-GDP ratio higher than 90% of GDP is associated with considerably lower...

In advanced economies interest rates generally vary inversely with the borrower's socio-economic status, because status tends to depend inversely on default risk. Both of these relationships depend critically on the impartiality of the law. Specifically, they require a lender to be able to sue a...