Tag Archives: debt

Debt Relief and Debtor Outcomes: Measuring the Effects of Consumer Bankruptcy Protection

From Will Dobbie and Jae Song: Consumer bankruptcy is one of the largest social insurance programs in the United States, but little is known about its impact on debtors. We use 500,000 bankruptcy filings matched to administrative tax and foreclosure … Continue reading

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Debt and the Consumption Response to Household Income Shocks

From Scott Baker: This paper exploits a new detailed household dataset with comprehensive financial information on millions of households to investigate the interaction between household balance sheets, income, and consumption during the Great Recession. In particular, I test whether consumption … Continue reading

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The Denominator Matters: Debt to GDP in Europe

A striking chart from the Economist.  

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Household Debt and the Dynamic Effects of Income Tax Changes

From James Cloyne and Paolo Surico: This paper investigates a new channel in the transmission of fiscal policy: household debt. Using a long span of expenditure survey data and a new narrative measure of exogenous income tax changes for the UK, … Continue reading

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Kimball & Wang: After crunching Reinhart and Rogoff’s data, we’ve concluded that high debt does not slow growth

From Miles Kimball and Yichuan Wang in Quartz: Leaving aside monetary policy, the textbook Keynesian remedy for recession is to increase government spending or cut taxes. The obvious problem with that is that higher government spending and lower taxes tend to … Continue reading

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Debt to GDP & Future Economic Growth

There has been a lot of discussion today on Reinhart and Rogoff’s work on Debt to GDP & future economic growth (see Mike Konczal, Krugman, CEPR, Brad Plumer,  and the original critique from Herden, Ash, Pollin), so I wanted to highlight some … Continue reading

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Reactions to Mankiw on the Long Run Budget Path

I agree with most of Greg Mankiw’s NYTimes piece on long-term debt to GDP but can’t overlook a glaring omission –  he seems to ignore the fact that we are currently experiencing a major economic catastrophe. Here’s how Mankiw concludes: Military … Continue reading

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Should the US be issuing more short-term debt?

As a follow up to yesterday’s post on short term debt, treasuries and financial crises, I wanted to highlight this paper by Greenwood, Hanson, & Stein that argues that the government should issue more short-term debt to discourage short-term money creation … Continue reading

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Short-term Debt, the Supply of US Treasuries, and Financial Crises

Annette Vissing-Jorgensen and  Arvind Krishnamurthy have an interesting new paper that Annette presented at Berkeley yesterday. It’s a nice example of using a simple, tractable model to understand a very important issue – the demand for safe and liquid short-term … Continue reading

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Crunch Time: Fiscal Crises and the Role of Monetary Policy

A nice chart from a new speech from Jerome Powell. What doesn’t follow is that we need to get the red line up by cutting spending to get the blue line down (based on the logic of Delong Summers and … Continue reading

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