State debt sustainability under global financial fragility conditions

Global Imbalances and Financial Fragility

The U.S. is currently engulfed in the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression. A key structural factor behind this crisis is the large demand for riskless assets from the rest of the world. In this paper we present a model to show how such demand not only triggered a sharp rise in U.S. asset prices, but also exposed the U.S. financial sector to a downturn by concentrating risk o...

Sustainability of Public Debt

Bank Ceos , inside Debt Compensation , and the Global Financial Crisis

Bank executives’ compensation has been widely identified as a culprit in the Global Financial Crisis, and reform of banker pay is high on the public policy agenda. While Congress targeted its reforms primarily at bankers’ equity-based pay incentives, empirical research fails to show any correlation between bank CEO equity incentives and bank performance in the Financial Crisis. We offer an alte...

Income Distribution, Debt Accumulation, and Financial Fragility in a Kaleckian Model with Labor Supply Constraints

This paper investigates the effect of changes in the retention ratio, profit share, interest rate, and natural rate of growth on the rate of capital accumulation and the financial structure of firms by using a Kaleckian growth model with labor supply constraints. We show that if the economy exhibits a debt-burdened regime, depending on certain conditions, there could be cyclical fluctuations su...

Governance and Financial Fragility