Political economy theory expects politicians to use budget deficits to engineer an election-timed boom, known as the political business cycle. We challenge and contextualize this view by incorporating the financial constraints faced by governments into an electoral framework. We argue that the...

This paper studies the long-run impact of public debt expansion on economic growth and investigates whether the debt-growth relation varies with the level of indebtedness. Our contribution is both theoretical and empirical. On the theoretical side, we develop tests for threshold effects in the...

We consider convertible bonds that contractually stipulate payment standstill, contingent on a market indicator of a sovereign's creditworthiness breaching a distress threshold. This financial innovation limits ex-ante the likelihood of debt crises and imposes ex-post risk sharing between...

This paper studies the long-run impact of public debt expansion on economic growth and investigates whether the debt-growth relation varies with the level of indebtedness. Our contribution is both theoretical and empirical. On the theoretical side, we develop tests for threshold effects in the...

This paper studies the long-run impact of public debt expansion on economic growth and investigates whether the debt-growth relation varies with the level of indebtedness. Our contribution is both theoretical and empirical. On the theoretical side, we develop tests for threshold effects in the...

The global surge in independent fiscal councils (IFCs) raises three related questions: How can IFCs improve the conduct of fiscal policy? Are they simultaneously desirable for voters and elected policymakers? And are they resilient to changes in political conditions? We build a model in which...

In this paper we provide new insights on the nexus between public debt and economic growth, focusing on the growth of debt rather than its level. By exploiting updated macroeconomic time series for 75 countries (37 OECD and 38 non-OECD) over the period 1972-2019 and using the system-GMM...