On January 25, 2022, Francesco Pintus, PhD candidate in Economics at the Department of Economics and Management at the University of Padua, will present his working paper: “Fiscal Discipline meets Macroeconomic Stability: When the Eurobonds are a Good Idea.” Greco, L., Pintus, F., Raggi, D. (2022).
Abstract:
We describe a new Euro-insurance bond that implies sovereign debt mutualization in the Eurozone without any significant short-term redistribution across countries or perverse incentives to fiscal profligacy. Relying on a GVAR model including the Eurozone countries, the U.S., Japan and China, we analyze the future evolution of public debt (and other key macroeconomic variables) over time by comparing the predicted forecast in the baseline scenario and in a counterfactual scenario with the Euro-insurance bond. We find no significant differences in the future path of interest expenditures- and public debt-over-GDP ratios in the two scenarios, but a consistent reduction in the uncertainty of the estimates in the counterfactual scenario. The reduced uncertainty of forecasts of public debt and other macroeconomic variables highlights the capacity of the Euro-insurance bond to immunize the Eurozone from classical macroeconomic instability shocks that derive by the very existence of high sovereign debts and the related significant rollover risk in a framework of decentralized fiscal policies. Moreover, the proposed scheme would imply a new source of EU revenues that derives by the collection of fiscal (in)discipline premia from individual members of the Eurozone.
This presentation is part of the cycle of internal economics seminars at the department of Economics and Management of the University of Padua. The seminar can be attended both in Sala Seminari – via del Santo 33 from 3 pm (CET), and on the Zoom platform at the following link. For all the details visit the dedicated page: https://www.economia.unipd.it/dsea-seminars/dsea-seminars/economics-seminars
