The end of the great moderation has profound implications on the assessment of fiscal sustainability. The pertinent issue goes beyond the obvious increase in the stock of public debt/GDP induced by the global recession, to include the neglected perspective that the vulnerabilities associated...

We define the notion of 'de facto fiscal space' of a country as the inverse of the outstanding public debt relative to the de facto tax base, where the latter measures the realized tax collection, averaged across several years to smooth for business cycle fluctuations. We apply this concept to...

As a share of GDP, the U.S. Federal debt held by the public exceeds 50 percent in FY2009, the highest debt ratio since 1955. Projections indicate the debt ratio may be in the 70-100 percent range within ten years. In many respects, the temptation to inflate away some of this debt burden is...

We estimate the pricing of sovereign risk for a large number of countries within and outside of Europe, before and after the global financial crisis, based on fiscal space and other economic fundamentals. We measure how accurately the model predicts CDS spreads based on fundamentals, and...

Using the "trilemma indexes" developed by Aizenman et al. (2010) that measure the extent of achievement in each of the three policy goals in the trilemma - monetary independence, exchange rate stability, and financial openness - we examine how policy configurations affect macroeconomic...

"This paper tests the importance of precautionary and mercantilist motives in accounting for the hoarding of international reserves by developing countries, and provides a model that quantifies the welfare gains from optimal management of international reserves. While the variables associated...