Excerpt

Fiscal Rules and Sovereign Default. Laura Alfaro, February 2016, Paper. "We provide a quantitative analysis of fiscal rules in a standard model of sovereign debt accumulation and default, modified to incorporate quasi-hyperbolic preferences. For reasons of political economy or aggregation of citizens’ preferences, government preferences are present biased, resulting in over accumulation of debt. A quantitative exercise calibrated to Brazil finds welfare gains of the optimal fiscal policy to be economically substantial, and the optimal rule to not entail a countercyclical fiscal policy." Link