This paper examines the effects of fiscal policy on private consumption. The paper evaluates the assumption that the effects of fiscal policy are dependent on the public sector's financial situation, which changes the private sector's income expectations. For this purpose regression equations...

Government debt and redistributive taxation can help people to smooth consumption when facing uninsurable individual specific risk. I examine the effects that variations in public debt and transfers have on risk sharing, efficiency, and the distribution of resources. I find that risk sharing can...

The paper discusses the trajectories of the Greek public deficit and sovereign debt over the last three decades and its connection to the political and economic environment of the same period. We pay special attention to the causality between the public and the foreign deficit. We argue that...

The paper discusses the trajectories of the Greek public deficit andsovereign debt between 1980 and 2010 and its connection to thepolitical and economic environment of the same period. We payspecial attention to the causality between the public and the externaldeficit in the period after 1995,...

This paper puts the original Reinhart-Rogoff dataset, made public by Herndon et al. (2013), to a formal econometric test to pin down debt threshold endogenously. We show that the nonlinear relation from debt to growth is not very robust. Taken with a pinch of salt, our results suggest, however,...

This paper puts the Reinhart-Rogoff dataset to a formal econometric testing to see whether public debt has a negative nonlinear effect on growth if public debt exceeds 90% of GDP. Using nonlinear threshold models, we show that the negative nonlinear relationship between debt and growth is very...

The global scope and depth of the 2007-2009 crisis is unprecedented in the post World War II period. As such, the most relevant comparison benchmark is the Great Depression, or the Great Contraction as dubbed by Friedman and Schwartz (1963). We highlight some of the similarities between these...

This paper investigates methods of assessing dynamic efficiency, points out their shortcomings and develops a new criterion of determining whether or not an economy accumulates too much capital. This criterion is then applied to the OECD countries as well as China. The analysis sheds a new light...

This paper uses data from 1995 to 2008 to estimate debt limits in the European Union countries derived from the budgetary responses to debt levels before the crisis. Based on work by the IMF (Ostry, 2010), we present our suggested approach and estimate the fiscal reaction functions and the...

At the beginning of the transition period, the public debt in Romania was insignificant. However, during the following years, the accumulating process accelerated. Although the indebtedness degree continues to be smaller than registered levels in other European countries, more dangerous could be...