France has a long and unique experience of public intervention in household debt restructuring. When facing financial distress, households can file a case to a “households’ over-indebtedness commission” (HOC). These HOCs either grant a delay of payment or impose a partial reimbursement of...

On 16-17 September 2010, the Banque de France’s Directorate General Economics and International Relations and the Bureau d’économie théorique et appliquée (BETA) of Strasbourg University jointly hosted a conference on the topic “New challenges for public debt in advanced economies”...

Can the evolution of public debt be predicted from its determinants? While the recovery programs undertaken during the 2008 crisis have led to a big takeoff in public debt ratios, the factors likely to curb its upward spiraling dynamic are subject to considerable uncertainty and fuel debate...

The question of reducing public debt is at the heart of the current debates in France where the level of debt ratio amounted to 86% of the GDP in 2011. In this paper, we examine how the primary balance, the GDP growth rate, the real interest rate and the inflation rate have influenced the...

The paper investigates, from the welfare and growth point of view, the determination of the optimal capacity of the banking system. For that purpose, we consider an overlapping generation model with endogenous growth.

In this paper, financial infrastructures increase the efficiency of the banking sector: they decrease the market power (due to horizontal differentiation) of the financial intermediaries, lower the cost of capital, increase the number of depositors and the amount of intermediated savings,...

The entropy principle yields, for a given set moments, a density that involves the smallest amount of prior information. We first show how entropy densities may be constructed in a numerically efficient way as the minimization of a potential. Next, for the case where the first four moments are...