We study the social and distributional implications of the euro area (EA) sovereign debt crisis in countries that received external financial assistance for macroeconomic adjustments. Combining granular data from about one million survey interviews with households across euro area states carried...

This paper documents changes in investors' demand for sovereign debt during a debt crisis. Using a dataset containing individual bids on Portuguese debt auctions, I document that bid functions become more inelastic during the crisis. That is, investors require bigger drops in price to buy...

We document that compared to all other investor groups investment funds exhibit a distinctly procyclical behavior when financial-market beliefs about the probability of a euro-related, institutional rare disaster spike. In response to such euro disaster risk shocks, investment funds shed...

Political risk is a significant determinant of bond yields and economic growth in both developed and emerging markets and we develop a debt sustainability analysis model with both channels using a country ratings proxy of political risk. Political risk also affects a sovereign's willingness to...

Starting from the Tinbergen principle and four areas of economic policy, we argue that in practice economic policies each have multiple effects, rendering a clear and simple allocation of objectives and instruments to different policies and their responsible institutions complex. First, the case...