India’s expansionary fiscal policy during the recent crisis resulted in higher government borrowing through 2008–09 and 2009–10. This borrowing requirement came in about 83% above the budget estimate in 2008–09, and 65% above the previous year in 2009–10. The debt-to-GDP ratio rose from 69% before the recent global financial crisis to 73% in 2010, creating a severe challenge for the Reserve Ban...

This paper proposes a theory of the fiscal foundations of inflation based on imperfect knowledge and learning. The theory is similar in spirit to, but distinct from, unpleasant monetarist arithmetic and the fiscal theory of the price level. Because the assumption of imperfect knowledge breaks Ricardian equivalence, details of fiscal policy, such as the average scale and composition of the publi...

Extant theory claims a firm's information environment impacts the choice between debt and equity financing. However, empirical evidence supporting this contention is limited. We evaluate this relation within the context of Regulation FD (Reg FD) which prohibited the use of selective disclosure. We find firms with high proprietary costs of public disclosure are more likely to resort to debt fina...

In this paper, we investigate the trade-off between the needs for budget consolidation and the desirability of expansionary fiscal policies as a means of demand management by simulating alternative scenarios with a macroeconometric model of the Slovenian economy. The simulations show that for the Slovenian economy an expansionary fiscal policy is neither feasible nor desirable: it leads to unsu...

The recent sharp increase in fiscal deficits and government debt in many countries raises questions regarding their impact on long-term sovereign bond yields. While economic theory suggests that this impact is likely to be adverse, empirical results have been less clear cut, have generally ignored nonlinear effects of deficits and debt through some other key determinants of yields, and have bee...

Rapidly rising stock prices in the 1990s raised worries about potential inflationary or destabilizing effects. The use of initial margin debt requirements by the Federal Reserve was proposed to reduce the run-up in stock prices. This paper evaluates the likely impact of margin debt requirements on stock valuations. The results suggest that higher margin requirements would have had no impact on ...

We use data on publicly traded UK firms to investigate whether financing choices differ systematically with R&D intensity. As well as looking at a balance sheet measure of the debt/assets ratio, we also consider the probability of raising finance by issuing new equity, and the shares of bank debt and secured debt in total debt. We find a non-linear relationship with the debt/assets ratio: firms...

This paper proposes a theory of government debt which, as opposed to previous theories, delivers an interior steady state that is independent of initial debt. The key elements are nominal public debt and a benevolent government that cannot commit to future policy choices. Governments face a trade-off. On the one hand, they would like to increase the debt and delay taxation, so as to reduce curr...