Estimating the effects of government debt and deficits on Treasury yields is complicated by the need to isolate the effects of fiscal policy from other influences. To abstract from the effects of the business cycle, and associated monetary policy actions, on debt, deficits, and interest rates, this paper studies the relationship between long-horizon expected government debt and deficits, measur...

Using state-dependent local projection methods and historical U.S. data, we find that government spending multipliers are considerably larger in periods of private debt overhang. In particular, we find significant crowding-out of personal consumption and investment in low private debt states, resulting in multipliers that are below one. Conversely, in periods of private debt overhang, there is ...

During the last three decades the stock of government debt has increased in most developed countries. During the same period we also observe a significant liberalization of international financial markets. In this paper we propose a multi-country political economy model with incomplete markets and endogenous government borrowing and show that governments choose higher levels of public debt when...

This note characterises the evolution of Chile’s public debt, and discusses its implications for the management of the country’s monetary policy. Historically, the main issuer of public debt in Chile was the central bank. The government, in turn, has recently started to engage in a more active debt policy, with the aim of deepening the market for risk-free securities and diversifying its fundin...

The U.S. government routinely misstates interest costs on government debt. These misstatements occur partly because the government fails to account properly for the real capital losses government creditors experience during inflationary periods.1 In addition, the government imperfectly measures the fluctuations in returns to its creditors from changes in interest rates and the maturity composit...

During the last three decades the stock of government debt has increased in most developed countries. During the same period international capital markets have been liberalized. In this paper we develop a two-country political economy model with incomplete markets and endogenous government borrowing and show that countries choose higher levels of public debt when financial markets are internati...

Government Debt as Insurance against Macroeconomic Risk Is there a role for debt beyond curing overaccumulation of capital? Does dynamic efficiency and the infeasibility of debt Ponzi schemes eliminate any Pareto-improving role for a government in a competitive economy with complete markets? Is there an optimal maturity structure of public debt? Using a stochastic Diamond OLG model, we tackle t...

Using a recursive empirical model of the real interest rate, GDP growth and the primary government deficit in the United States, I solve for the ergodic distribution of the debt/GDP ratio. If such a distribution exists, the government is satisfying its intertemporal budget constraint. One key finding is that historical fiscal policy would bring the current high-debt ratio back to its normal lev...

We study optimal income taxes and transfers in an economy with heterogeneous agents and aggregate shocks. An optimal equilibrium determines agents’ net asset positions, but not their absolute levels. The distribution of debt holdings across agents influences optimal allocations and taxes, but the level of government debt does not. Higher correlations of debt holdings and labor incomes imply mor...

What determines the sustainability of sovereign debt? In this paper, we develop a model where myopic governments seek electoral popularity but can nevertheless commit credibly to service external debt. They do not default when they are poor even though default costs are low because they would lose access to debt markets and be forced to reduce spending; they do not default when they become rich...