Recently, we have seen a number of explorations of the timing of growth around episodes of high debt as a way to discern the likely direction of causality in that relationship.  This is important, because we doobserve that there is a negative correlation between contemporaneous debt and growth. For instance, this is true when using the corrected data from Reinhart and Rogoff, and equal weighting of country-year observations. Although there is no evidence of tipping points, a negative relationship remains.

In a blog post in April, I showed that the timing of this negative relationship went against an interpretation where high debt caused low growth.

Continue reading here.

Recent work by my colleagues at UMass Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin (2013)—hereafter HAP—has demonstrated that in contrast to the apparent results in Reinhart and Rogoff (2010), there is no real discontinuity or “tipping point” around 90 percent of debt-to-GDP ratio.

In their response, Reinhart and Rogoff—hereafter RR—admit to the arithmetic mistakes, but argue that the negative correlation between debt-to-GDP ratio and growth in the corrected data still supports their original contention.

Continue reading the post here.