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We study the role of government debt maturity in currency unions to identify whether debt management can help governments to hedge their budgets against spending shocks. We first use a detailed dataset of debt portfolios of five Euro Area countries to run a battery of VARs, estimating the responses of holding period returns to fiscal shocks. We find that government portfolios, which in our sample comprise mainly of nominal assets, have not been effective in absorbing idiosyncratic fiscal risks, whereas they have been very effective in absorbing aggregate risks. We then setup a formal model of optimal debt management with two countries, distortionary taxes and aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks. The theoretical model concludes that nominal bonds are not optimal to insure against idiosyncratic fiscal shocks in a currency area. In contrast, we find that long term inflation indexed debt allows governments to take full advantage of fiscal hedging.

Standard optimal Debt Management (DM) models prescribe a dominant role for long bonds and advocate against issuing short bonds. They require very large positions in order to complete markets and assume each period that governments repurchase all outstanding bonds and reissue (r/r) new ones. These features of DM are inconsistent with U.S. data. We introduce incomplete markets via small transaction costs which serves to make optimal DM more closely resemble the data : r/r are negligible, short bond issuance substantial and persistent and short and long bonds positively co-vary. Intuitively, long bonds help smooth taxes over states and short bonds over time. Solving incomplete market models with multiple assets is challenging so a further contribution of this article is introducing a novel computational method to find global solutions.

Standard optimal Debt Management (DM) models prescribe a dominant role for long bonds and advocate against issuing short bonds. They require very large positions in order to complete markets and assume each period that governments repurchase all outstanding bonds and reissue (r/r) new ones. These features of DM are inconsistent with U.S. data. We introduce incomplete markets via small transaction costs which serves to make optimal DM more closely resemble the data : r/r are negligible, short bond issuance substantial and persistent and short and long bonds positively co-vary. Intuitively, long bonds help smooth taxes over states and short bonds over time. Solving incomplete market models with multiple assets is challenging so a further contribution of this article is introducing a novel computational method to find global solutions.

We study the role of government debt maturity in a monetary union in the absence of fiscal transfers across countries. Our key finding is that fiscal hedging is only possible when spending represents an aggregate shock in the union. In the case of idiosyncratic disturbances in spending it is not possible to target a portfolio which provides fiscal insurance to the governments: the allocation is one of incomplete financial markets. These implications are in line with the empirical evidence. Using a sample of 5 Euro area countries and historical holding period returns on government debt, we find that fiscal insurance is not signifi cant against country specific shocks however, it is significant against aggregate shocks. Our analysis extends the theoretical results of the literature on optimal fiscal policy without state contingent debt to a two country model. We show that in the two country setup and under an incomplete market the optimal tax schedule, consumption and leisure follow a random walk.

Standard optimal Debt Management (DM) models prescribe a dominant role for long bonds and advocate against issuing short bonds. They require very large positions in order to complete markets and assume each period that governments repurchase all outstanding bonds and reissue ( r/r ) new ones. These features of DM are inconsistent with US data. We introduce incomplete markets via small transaction costs which serves to make optimal DM more closely resemble the data : r/r are negligible, short bond issuance substantial and persistent and short and long bonds positively co-vary. Intuitively long bonds help smooth taxes over states and short bonds over time. Solving incomplete market models with multiple assets is challenging so a further contribution of this paper is introducing a novel computational method to find global solutions.

Design/methodology/approach: Learned from Leary (2009), Konstantinos Voutsinas and Richard A.Werner (2011), this study designs a model of debt maturity structure with an unbalanced panel data set. It consists of 1352 Chinese listed companies with8124 observations during the period of 2003-2011. Hausman test hasbeen used, and the findings support the fixed effects model.Findings: Besidesthe factors that have been confirmed by previous researches, debt maturitystructure is also sensitive to other factors, such as economicexpectations, monetary policy, financial restrictions and changes in tax rates.Research limitations/implications: There are still many cases, which affect the debt maturitystructure, are worth of further exploring, for instance, the impactof lagged monetary policy, the determinants of short-term debt ratio and thecost of operating.Practical implications: From the macro point of view, research in this area enable thegovernment to introduce more suitable policies that direct and promote thedevelopment of the bond market, thus it spurs corporations to choose theproper finance structure. From the micro point of view, firms can learn fromthe research to choose the efficient method and term of financing as well asdebt structure.Originality/value: In some way, conclusions of this papercontribute to the study of dynamic characteristics and factors of debt maturitystructure in Chinese listed companies., Peer Reviewed