Increasing market discipline has emerged as a major policy issue for banking regulators. The most prominent proposals for increasing market discipline would require banks to issue subordinated debt to the public. This paper explores the fundamental rationale behind mandatory subordinated debt proposals and their advantages and disadvantages. Our analysis indicates that a subordinated debt requi...

Article history: Received 6 March 2012 Received in revised form 30 May 2013 Accepted 4 June 2013 Available online 11 June 2013 We suggest that the limited access to the public debt market is a reason for the violations of pecking order behavior documented in literature. We show that as information asymmetry increases, two effects take place. On the one hand, firms do desire to increase the debt...

We empirically examine the impact of flotation costs, agency conflicts, regulation, and information asymmetries on a firm’s mix between public and private debt. Results indicate that firms with larger issue sizes exploit the scale economies in flotation costs of public debt. Firms with higher contracting costs due to moral hazard have higher proportions of private debt. There is only limited su...

We describe a simple mechanism that generates inflation persistence in a standard sticky-price model of optimal fiscal and monetary policy. Key to this mechanism is that policies are implemented under discretion. The government’s discretionary incentive to erode the real value of nominal public debt by means of surprise inflation renders inflation expectations and, in further consequence, equil...

We study the sustainability of public debt in a closed production economy where a benevolent government chooses fiscal policies, including haircuts on its outstanding debt, in a discretionary manner. Government bonds are held by domestic agents to smooth consumption over time and because they provide collateral and liquidity services. We characterize a recursive equilibrium where public debt am...

The debt maturity of U.S. industrial firms decreased over the past three decades. This decrease in maturity is driven by the smallest firms for which the median percentage of long-term debt has decreased from 53% in 1976 to 6% in 2008. For large firms, however, debt maturity has not declined. Information asymmetry plays an important role in explaining the decrease in debt maturity, while debt a...

We analyze how public debt evolves when successive policymakers have different policy goals and cannot make credible commitments about their future policies. We consider several cases to be able to quantify the effects of imperfect commitment, political disagreement and political turnover. Imperfect commitment drives the long-run level of debt to zero. With political disagreement debt is a size...

The aim of this paper is to study the relationship between the shadow economy and corruption as determinants of public debt in the Spanish Autonomous Communities. In addition, we construct a Corruption Perception Index for those regions. Our data constitute panel data for the period 2000–2012. The results show that the volume of the shadow economy has a significant and positive impact on region...

This paper examines equilibrium determination under different monetary policy regimes when the government might default on its debt. We apply a cash-inadvance model where the government does not have access to non-distortionary taxation and does not account for initial outstanding debt when it sets the income tax rate. Solvency is then not guaranteed and sovereign default can affect the return ...

This paper contributes to the literature by empirically examining whether the influence of public debt on economic growth differs between the short and the long run and presents different patterns across euro-area countries. To this end, we use annual data from both central and peripheral countries of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) for the 1960-2012 period and estimate a growth ...