We replicate Reinhart and Rogoff (2010a and 2010b) and find that coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics lead to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and GDP growth among 20 advanced economies in the postwar period. Our finding is that when properly calculated, the average real GDP growth...

The postwar literature on public debt has been concerned primarily with two related issues: (1)whether public debt allows the cost of government to be shifted forward onto future generations and (2) whether the creation of public debt involves a positive net wealth effect. The development of this literature can be portrayed chronologically by three works, even though many authors have contribut...

Public debt is one of the important economic variables that quantitatively describes a nation’s economy. Because bankruptcy is a risk faced even by institutions as large as governments (e.g., Iceland), national debt should be strictly controlled with respect to national wealth. Also, the problem of eliminating extreme poverty in the world is closely connected to the study of extremely poor debt...

We present a theory of endogenous fiscal policy and growth. Fiscal policy — debt, income tax, spending on local public goods and public investment — is determined through legislative bargaining. Economic growth depends directly on public investment, private investment in human capital and, via learning-by-doing, labor supply. The model predicts that the economy converges to a balanced growth pa...

This paper empirically analyzes the nonlinear relation between real GDP growth per capital and public debt by employing ADL test for threshold cointegration method. Empirical results show that there exists a threshold cointegration relationship between public debt and real GDP growth per capital. In case of the empirical results, cutting public debt could boost economic growth in the long-term....

Testing the reaction of the primary surplus to variations in public debt, relative to GDP respectively, has been frequently resorted to in order to test for sustainability of a given debt policy. In this contribution, we analyze theoretically under which condition a positive reaction of the primary surplus to variations in debt implies a sustainable debt policy. We demonstrate that the evolutio...