This paper explores the political economy of fiscal adjustment. It begins with an examination of the evidence for, and sources of, ‘deficit bias’, including political and governance factors, public attitudes, the role of financial markets and imprecision about which debt targets should be...

This paper studies heterogeneity in the fiscal reaction function for European Union members by resorting to the unconditional quantile regression estimation. Based on annual observations spanning from 2005 to 2018, the results point to significant asymmetries concerning the fiscal response...

Evidence suggests that sovereign defaults disrupt international trade. As a consequence, countries that are more open have more to lose from a sovereign default and are less inclined to renege on their debt. In turn, lenders should trust more open countries and charge them with lower interest...

We assess the drivers of fiscal sustainability in 20 OECD economies between 1950 and 2019. We find stable long-term relationships between government revenues and expenditures as well as between the primary budget balance and past public debt ratio for the full panel. Performing an expanding...

The existing theoretical literature on fiscal competition has to a large extent ignored the role of government debt as a determinant of taxes and productive public spending. We develop a simple model of fiscal competition with government borrowing. If a default on government debt is no option,...

In March 2013 around 130 participants from academia, banking and finance, governments and central banking gathered at the premises of the OeNB in Vienna for a conference jointly organized by the European Money and Finance Forum SUERF, the OeNB and the Austrian Society for Bank Research to...

This paper studies heterogeneity in the fiscal reaction function for European Union members by resorting to the unconditional quantile regression estimation. Based on annual observations spanning from 2005 to 2018, the results point to significant asymmetries concerning the fiscal response...

This paper empirically studies public debt sustainability with the penalized panel splines approach for 25 EU economies from 2000 to 2019 by estimating the response of the primary surplus to lagged debt relative to GDP, respectively. A positive coefficient on average indicates sustainable...

With this paper our objective is to study the effects of different deficit policies in an endogenous growth model with publicly funded human capital accumulation and public debt, where we allow for heterogeneous households. Two types of households are considered. One household acquires human...

This paper empirically studies non-linearities in debt sustainability analysis by resorting to the modern estimation technique of panel smooth transition regression (PSTR). We assess euro area debt sustainability by analysing the reaction of the primary balance to changes in public debt,...