This paper considers alternative modes of stabilization of world-wide and relative levels of public debt. The analysis is in terms of a model of overlapping, infinitely lived households. Three methods are compared: tax finance, public- consumption finance and monetary finance. We show that a...

We investigate the effects of budgetary policies on growth rates, external debt, real interest rates and the stock market valuation of capital in a two-country, overlapping-generations model of endogenous growth. A worldwide rise in the public debt/GDP ratio, or the share of government...

If one ranks cities by population, the rank of a city is inversely related to its size, a well-documented phenomenon known as Zipf's Law. Further, the growth rate of a city's population is uncorrelated with its size, another well-known characteristic known as Gibrat's Law. In this paper, I show...

This paper studies the determinants of global liquidity using data on cross-border bank flows, with a longer time series and broader country sample than previous studies. We define global liquidity as non-price determinants of cross-border credit supply, consistent with its meaning as the...

This paper addresses the issue of whether regimes of fixed exchange rates are a mechanism for shifting volatility inter-temporally. Using a panel of data covering 20 industrialized countries from 1959 through 1993, I examine the volatilities of a host of real and monetary variables. Graphical...

The two central economic problems facing Hungary are its large foreign debt and its relatively poor rate of growth over the 1980s. The paper examines some of the reform issues facing Hungary, starting with the tax reforms of 1988 and 1989, but concentrating on the importance of creating...

Blanchard (2005) suggested that active interest rate policy might induce unstable dynamics in highly-indebted economies. We examine this in a dynamic general equilibrium model where Calvo-type price rigidities provide a rationale for inflation stabilization. Unstable dynamics can occur when the...