This article examines the debt history of two contenders for European hegemony: 16th-century Spain and 18th-century Britain. We analyze their fiscal behavior using measures of overborrowing and fiscal policy functions. Our results suggest that stringency was not key for Britain's success in...

This article provides a historical overview of the factors leading up to debt crises and the default methods used by the governments to solve them, ranging from repudiation and restructuring to inflation tax and financial repression. The paper also analyses the Spanish governments’ graduation...

Drawing on a new data set of monthly observations, this paper investigates similarities and differences in the discount rate policy of 12 European countries under the Classical Gold Standard. It asks, in particular, whether the bank rate policy followed different patterns in core and peripheral...

Este documento de trabajo proporciona un análisis de los objetivos buscados con las emisiones de deuda finalista durante el franquismo, la estructura de la deuda en circulación y la sostenibilidad de la deuda. Como era más barata, se abusó de la deuda flotante que luego se consolidó. La...

We point out that the two and half years of negotiation (1692-1694) between a group of investors and the English government, who led to the establishment of the Bank of England, aimed to guarantee the liquidity of a new public debt and not to establish a bank. We analyze the evolution of the...

This paper evaluates under which conditions different Taylor-type rules lead to determinacy and expectational stability (E-stability) of rational expectations equilibrium in a simple 'New Keynesian' small open economy model, developed by Gali and Monacelli (2005). In particular, we extend the...

Policy makers face trade-off in dealing with exchange rate management, mo- netary independence and concerns about capital mobility simultaneously. This study empirically examines the effects of Nigeria's trilemma policy path on interest rate using data spanning from 1997:Q1 to 2017:Q3. It...

This paper presents Bank of Canada staff's current assessment of the US neutral rate, along with a newly developed set of models on which that assessment is based. The overall assessment is that the US neutral rate currently lies in a range of 1.75 to 2.75 percent. This represents a decline of...

This paper investigates the impact of the history of crises on macroeconomic performance. We first study the impact of past banking crises on the probability of a future banking crisis. Applying data for 1980 - 2010 for all countries for which the required information is available, controlling...

On September 3-4, 2009 SUERF and Utrecht University School of Economicsorganized the Colloquium "The Quest for Stability" in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium.