Banking Union with a Sovereign Virus: The self-serving regulatory treatment of sovereign debt in the euro area
Gros, Daniel. In many eurozone countries, domestic banks often hold more than 20% of domestic public debt, which is an unsatisfactory situation given that banks are highly leveraged and that sovereign debt is inherently subject to default risk within the euro area. This paper by Daniel Gros finds, however, that the relative concentration of public […]
A Modern History of Fiscal Prudence and Profligacy
Mauro, Paolo, Romeu, Rafael, Binder, Ariel & Zaman, Asad. We draw on a newly collected historical dataset of fiscal variables for a large panel of countries—to our knowledge, the most comprehensive database currently available—to gauge the degree of fiscal prudence or profligacy for each country over the past several decades. Specifically, our dataset consists of […]