Estimates of the natural interest rate are often useful in the analysis of monetary and other macroeconomic policies. The topic gathered much attention following the great financial crisis and the Euro Area debt crisis due to the uncertainty regarding the timing of monetary policy normalization...

This study finds that equity returns in the banking sector in the wake of the Great Recession and the European sovereign debt crisis have been driven mainly by weak growth prospects and heightened sovereign risk and to a lesser extent, by deteriorating funding conditions and investor sentiment....

This paper argues that asset price cycles have significant effects on fiscal outcomes. In particular, there is evidence of debt bias—the tendency of debt to increase over the cycle— that is significantly larger for house price cycles than stand-alone business cycles. Automatic stabilizers...

The international community has a role to play in addressing this gap. In that regard, this paper is intended to stimulate debate on the problems in the current practices for sovereign debt restructuring and puts forward some proposals to improve the functioning of sovereign debt markets. The...

This paper provides a tractable framework to assess how the structure of debt instruments-specifically by currency denomination and indexation to GDP-can raise the debt limit of a sovereign. By calibrating the model to different country fundamentals, it is clear that there is no...

How does the South African government react to changes in its debt position? In investigating the question, this paper estimates fiscal reaction functions using various methods (OLS, VAR, TAR, GMM, State-Space modelling and VECM). The paper finds that since 1946 the South African government has...