This paper studies the impact of income inequality on sovereign spreads under elastic labor and endogenous taxation. We first document that high pre-tax income inequality is associated with high spreads both across countries and across U.S. states. We then develop a sovereign default model with...

This paper analyzes the impact of a balanced budget rule (BBR) on government financing costs. We construct measures of BBR at the US state government level, and find that states with tighter BBRs are associated with significantly lower state government bond spreads. Furthermore, the credit...