In standard public finance theory a government’s cost of borrowing depends on the common beliefs held by rational investors regarding default risk. We advance understanding of the effects of diverse beliefs and overconfidence among investors in their ability to assess the sovereign’s creditworthiness. Theoretically, we find that demand for insurance against default is positively related to the ...

Governments in emerging markets often behave like a “tormented insurer,” who would like to smooth government outlays given the randomness of public revenues in an imperfect world where the only public debt instrument is a non-state-contingent bond denominated in units of tradable goods. How can a fiscal authority tell if the stock of public debt is consistent with fiscal solvency in this enviro...

We examine the relation between a borrowing firm’s ownership structure and its choice of debt source using a novel, hand-collected data set on corporate ownership, control and debt structures for 9,831 firms in 20 countries from 2001 to 2010. We find that the divergence between control rights and cash-flow rights of a borrowing firm’s largest ultimate owner has a significant impact on the firm’...

This paper explores the implications of the political economy model of Battaglini and Coate (2008) for the behavior of fiscal policy over the business cycle. The model predicts that fiscal policy is counter-cyclical with debt increasing in recessions and decreasing in booms. Public spending increases in booms and decreases during recessions, while tax rates decrease during booms and increase in...

In this note we theoretically investigate the question of whether the relationship between public debt and economic growth is characterized by an inverse U-shaped functional form. Starting point of our analysis is the paper by Checherita-Westphal et al. (2012) who present an endogenous growth model with public capital and public debt that displays a hump-shaped relation between debt and economi...

I propose a simple model with complete and perfect information that analyzes the relation between managerial incentive compensation and the firm’s choice between public and bank debt. My analysis of firm-level data over the period 1992-2005 offers considerable support to the predictions of the model. I find a positive relation between the level of incentive compensation and the preference for b...

Modern theories of government finance stress the importance of an economy s fiscal deficits in determining the course of monetary policy. Modern growth theory stresses the role of monetary factors in economic growth. This paper explores how these two are interrelated, using a simple AK growth model, one with money, reserve requirements, and government debt. We provide a comprehensive look at th...

Global games with endogenous information often exhibit multiple equilibria. In this paper we show how one can nevertheless identify useful predictions that are robust across all equilibria and that could not have been delivered in the common-knowledge counterparts of these games. Our analysis is conducted within a flexible family of games of regime change, which have been used to model, inter a...

We examine a company’s decision to issue public debt for the first time by analyzing its behavior around the time of obtaining its first debt rating. Contrary to our expectations, we find that firms are more likely to pay dividends in the years prior to the initial rating rather than at or after the announcement date, and that the amount of dividend payments actually appears to decline (rather ...

This paper investigates the shortand long-run relationship between domestic wealth, capital stock and the net foreign asset position of industrialised and developing countries. Using cointegration techniques, a link between output per capita, the stock of public debt and age distribution on saving, investment and hence, the net external wealth of countries is established. Public debt, GDP per c...