We present historical data on sovereign bond spreads drawn from 300 years of data (from the late seventeenth century to the late twentieth century), which appear to be inconsistent with the North and Weingast (1989) view that institutional changes and reforms can reduce the cost of government debt soon after they are implemented. Extended time series data on British government debt from the lat...

This paper examines the impact of government policy on the allocation of aggregate risks in a stochastic OG model with production. The market allocation of risk depends significantly on the young generation’s willingness to substitute intertemporally and on government policy. Safe government debt shifts productivity risk from old to young while wageindexed social security is essentially neutral...

We present a monetary endogenous growth model and analyze the effects of fiscal and monetary policy with real money as an argument in the utility function. We show that a balanced government budget gives a higher balanced growth rate and lower inflation than a situation with permanent public deficits. It also leads to higher welfare compared to a situation with permanent deficits where the gove...

The recent sovereign debt crisis raises a debate on whether the cancelation of sovereign debt is compatible with democracy. Scholars opposed to the cancelation of sovereign debt refer to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which the British government began to make the people as a whole liable for the obligations incurred by their government. These scholars argue that this commitment formed the...

We analyze the role of government intertemporal budget policies in a growing open economy including nominal assets in the presence of an upward sloping supply of debt. This introduces transitional dynamics that influence the effects of government policy instruments on the long term fiscal liability. In particular, shifts in capital income taxes can lead to dynamic scoring effects through the ev...

In this paper we examine how model uncertainty due to the preference for robustness (RB) affects optimal taxation and the evolution of debt in the Barro tax-smoothing model (1979). We first study how the government spending shocks are absorbed in the short run by varying taxes or through debt under RB. Furthermore, we show that introducing RB improves the model’s predictions by generating (i) t...

This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. This paper examines the relationship between government debt ...

This paper explores the impact of China’s local government debt on economic growth. This analysis, based on a panel of 31 provinces over 14 years, takes into account a broad range of economic growth determinants as well as various estimation issues including heteroskedascity and omitted variable. The empirical results suggest an inverse relationship between China’s local government debt and eco...

Most analyses of monetary policy delegation schemes typically ignore the behavior of the fiscal policy maker. The paper investigates how monetary price level targeting or monetary nominal income targeting may yield social gain in an economy with government debt and where the fiscal policymaker, acting strategically, may take counter actions. We argue that the choice of fiscal policy instrument ...

This paper shows that if the timing of debt auctions within a period is sufficiently unfettered, any stochastic outcome path of real economic variables which can be achieved as an equilibrium of a game where a government has access to a rich debt structure can be achieved as an equilibrium of a game where the government can only issue one period debt. Likewise, any stochastic outcome path which...