'Revisiting Reinhart & Rogoff after the Crisis: A Time Series Perspective'

This paper offers a straightforward and descriptive contribution to the recent and busy debate on fiscal discipline made popular by a seminal paper by Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) after policymakers have sought foundation and justification of a policy known as austerity measures following the recent sovereign debt crisis. We revisit the debate on whether or not higher debt levels impede growth rates and contribute by offering a time series perspective of a corrected data set and also a more recent and higher frequency source. We find that with further hindsight and from a time series perspective there is no support for the view that higher levels of debt cause reductions in economic activity.