This paper examines whether investors react to consumption taxes. Despite the near global adoption of VAT policies, relatively little is known regarding the investor response to VAT changes. In an event-study setup, using a new dataset of daily equity returns and precise dates of tax policy...

Quantitative models of sovereign debt predict that countries should default during deep recessions. However, empirical research on sovereign debt has found a surprisingly large share of "good times" defaults (i.e., defaults that happen when GDP is above trend). Existing evidence also indicates...

The 2015 Addis Ababa Action Agenda recognized the need for policies aimed at maintaining longterm debt sustainability. This paper describes a set of commonly used definitions of debt sustainability and shows that none of them focuses on long-term debt sustainability. It then discusses concept...

Do sovereign bond investors care about taxation in the countries where they invest? In this paper, I examine the response of sovereign spreads to changes in tax revenues, bases and rates. In simple OLS regressions there is a negligible relationship between sovereign spreads and taxation....

This paper studies how the presence of foreign investors in local currency sovereign debt markets contributes to the transmission of global financial conditions to emerging market economies. My estimations indicate that the higher the share of local currency government bonds held by foreign...

This paper uses the rules of engineering as a rhetorical device to discuss why the international financial architecture needs a structured mechanism for dealing with sovereign insolvency. The paper suggests that the most important problem with the status-quo relates to delayed defaults and...

This paper introduces a novel index to measure public investment quality, utilizing the World Bank's investment project performance data from 120 countries over the period 2000-2021. After detailing the construction of the index, the paper examines how public investment quality influences the...

This paper studies the relationship between sovereign spreads and the interaction between debt composition and debt levels in advanced and emerging market countries. It finds that in emerging market countries there is a significant correlation between spreads and debt levels. This correlation,...

For over a century, legal scholars have debated the question of what to do about the debts incurred by despotic governments; asking whether successor non-despotic governments should have to pay them. That debate has gone nowhere. This paper examines whether an Op Ed written by Harvard economist,...

We estimate public investment gaps in a sample of developing countries using a public investment demand function. We then use GDP per capita projections, forecasts of structural transformation, and three SDG targets (poverty, infant mortality and lower secondary school completion) to predict...