A dynamic model with credit under limited commitment is constructed, in which limited memory can weaken the effects of punishment for default. This creates an endogenous role for government debt in credit markets, and the economy can be non-Ricardian. Default can occur in equilibrium, and government debt essentially plays a role as collateral and thus improves borrowers’ incentives. The provisi...

The US government accumulated a large amount of debt from WWII. The government debt-to-GDP ratio in the US peaked at 108% in 1946. This ratio dropped dramatically in the following two decades, to 35% in 1966. Simultaneously, the US experienced a massive baby boom. This paper studies the relationship between these two phenomena in a modified version of the Barro-Becker model. In the model, the g...

We analyse the implications of optimal taxation for the stochastic behaviour of debt. We show that when a government pursues an optimal fiscal policy under complete markets, the value of debt has the same or less persistence than other variables in the economy and it declines in response to shocks that cause the deficit to increase. By contrast, under incomplete markets debt shows more persiste...

This paper studies how the method of government debt financing affects the macroeconomic performance of the transforming Chinese economy. The investigation is conducted within the context of an endogenous growth model that incorporates the major institutional features of the Chinese economy. Using this framework, we evaluate the effects on the growth rate of output and inflation if the Chinese ...

We propose a dynamic general equilibrium model that yields testable implications about the fiscal policy run by governments of different political color. Successive generations of voters choose taxation, expenditure, and government debt through repeated elections. Voters are heterogeneous by age and by the intensity of their preferences for public good provision. The political equilibrium switc...

a r t i c l e i n f o Sovereign debt crises in emerging markets are usually associated with liquidity and banking crises. The conventional view is that the domestic turmoil is the consequence of foreign retaliation, although there is no clear empirical evidence on " classic " default penalties. This paper emphasizes, instead, a direct link between sovereign defaults and liquidity crises buildin...