Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of government debt and deficits on long-term interest rates in 17 advanced economies over the period 1973–2016 from the perspective of currency sovereignty. The empirical findings of this paper suggest the market penalizes non-sovereign nations for the same amount of fiscal deficit with higher interest rates than sovereigns. In addition, non-sovereign countries face accelerating interest rates for an increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio beyond a certain threshold (49% to GDP) while such a pattern is not obvious among sovereign nations. Overall, the results support Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) view that a monetarily sovereign government, as a monopoly issuer of currency, can influence the prices of their liabilities to a significant extent, somewhat independent of existing public debt and market sentiment.

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