Public debt and macroeconomic activity: a predictive analysis for advanced economies

Abstract

AbstractUsing post-war data on advanced economies, we find that a higher public debt ratio predicts marginally slower GDP growth under the assumption of a linear relationship. This result is robust to strong persistence in debt ratio, which may cause finite sample bias in estimation and inference. In the nonlinear framework, we find only weak support for piece-wise linear models that explicitly incorporate the idea of a debt