H63

Atif Mian · Ludwig Straub · Amir Sufi

This paper develops a tractable continuous-time model to study the fiscal sustainability of government deficits and the joint dynamics of public debt, with two main ingredients: an endogenous interest …

Robert J. Barro

This 1974 Journal of Political Economy paper by Robert Barro asks whether an increase in government bonds raises households' perceived net wealth, and argues that within an overlapping-generations …

Christopher A. Sims

Sims argues that fiat government debt is best understood as analogous to privately issued equity rather than to privately issued debt, since it promises only future paper rather than a commodity the …

Thomas J. Sargent · François R. Velde

Interpreting the French Revolution through the lens of government-budget-constraint theory, this paper traces how a pre-1789 fiscal crisis, the assignat's evolution from tax-backed money into fiat …

Alan J. Auerbach · Yuriy Gorodnichenko

This 2012 American Economic Journal: Economic Policy paper by Alan Auerbach and Yuriy Gorodnichenko estimates how government spending multipliers vary with the state of the business cycle, using a …

Peter A. Diamond

This 1965 American Economic Review paper by Peter Diamond extends Samuelson's pure consumption-loan model by adding a produced, durable capital good, so that people can provide for retirement either …

Craig Burnside · Martin Eichenbaum · Sergio Rebelo

Studies how governments finance the fiscal costs of "twin" currency-and-banking crises and shows that debt devaluation and implicit or explicit fiscal reform, not just money printing, can explain why …

Harold L. Cole · Timothy Kehoe

A dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in which a government that must roll over one-period debt can be forced into default purely because lenders expect it -- and a characterisation of …

Juan J Cruces · Christoph Trebesch

The first present-value estimates of creditor losses for all 180 sovereign debt restructurings with foreign banks and bondholders between 1978 and 2010 -- average haircut 37%, with half the cases …