This paper studies sovereign debt relief in a long-term perspective. We quantify the relief achieved through default and restructuring in two distinct samples: 1920-1939, focusing on the defaults on official (government to government) debt in advanced economies after World War I; and 1978-2010,...

Since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods System diverging current account positions in Europe have prevailed. While the Southern and Western European countries have tended to run current account deficits, the current accounts of the Central and Northern European countries, in particular Germany,...

We estimate fiscal reaction functions for non-hydrocarbon tax and public spending shares of national income and for debt management strategies adopted by Norway and compare these with rules that would prevail under the permanent income hypothesis and bird-in-hand rule. We conclude that the...

We use a panel of 21 OECD countries from 1970 to 2009 to investigate the effects of different fiscal adjustment strategies on long-term interest rates – a key fiscal indicator reflecting the costs of government debt service. A government confronted with high deficits and rising debt will...

During the last three decades there has been an almost continuous undermining of the public interest by private interests operating either outside or inside Greek public administration. The result of this infiltration has been a gradual loss of bureaucratic autonomy to pursue the public...

Sovereign defaults are bad news for investors and debtor countries, in particular if a default becomes messy and protracted. Why are some debt crises resolved quickly, in a matter of months, while others take many years to settle? This paper studies the duration of sovereign debt crises based on...

The objective of this paper is to assess whether external debt makes a difference for public debt stabilization, where external debt is considered through the non-residents' holdings according to a Balance of Payments perspective. The analysis is empirical and considers the case of Italy, one of...

Large and growing levels of public debt in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and the Euro Area raise new interest in the cross-country effects of a large open economy's deficits. We consider a dynamic optimizing model with costly tax collection and exogenously given public spending and...

We apply non-linear error-correction models to the empirical testing of the sustainability of the government’s intertemporal budget constraint. Our empirical analysis, based on Italy, shows that the Italian government is meeting its intertemporal budget constraint, in spite of the high levels...