This paper examines Keynes's thoughts on the economic causes of war. Though an issue upon which the classical economists and their popularisers wrote much, the links between economics and war has become, beyond an unthinking acceptance of the pacific qualities of free trade, an issue largely...

This paper tells you everything you need to know in order to impress your friends with your knowledge of the most famous people and the useful past of the subject of economics. However, it is recommended that this paper should not be read in the company of anyone who reads dusty old books, and...

In this paper I look in some detail at one specific aspect of macro distribution theories, namely Keynes's Macro theory of profits.

This study assesses debt sustainability in South Africa allowing for possible nonlinearities in the form of threshold behaviour by fiscal authorities. A long historical data series on the debt-to-GDP ratio and models with fixed and time-varying thresholds allowing the level of debt to vary...

In recent contributions, Weizs cker (2014) and Summers (2014) maintain that mature economies accumulate too much capital. They suggest large and lasting public deficits as a remedy. This paper argues that overaccumulation cannot occur in an economy with land. It presents novel data of aggregate...

Many economic studies analyse the impact of fiscal rules and discuss their effectiveness in limiting excessive debt. A majority of these studies, however, neglects or only deals insufficiently with the potential issue of endogeneity. In this paper, we propose a novel identification approach...

Credit rating agencies are frequently criticized for producing sovereign ratings that do not accurately reflect the economic and political fundamentals of rated countries. This article discusses how the home country of rating agencies could affect rating decisions as a result of political...

The asset value of government has traditionally been seen as the accounting value of public assets. We develop a detailed financial economics view on sovereign asset values using market measures to arrive at implied sovereign asset values. We establish definition and dependencies within the...

Through an intertemporal budget constraint, jurisdictions may gain advantages in tax and spending competition by 'competing' on debt. While the existing spatial econometric literature focuses on tax and spending competition, very little is known about spatial interaction via public debt. This...

We study the sustainability of public debt in a closed production economy where a benevolent government chooses fiscal policies, including haircuts on its outstanding debt, in a discretionary manner. Government bonds are held by domestic agents to smooth consumption over time and because they...