Business Talk with Xavier Debrun, Chief Economist and Director General at the Banque de France

We are delighted to welcome Xavier Debrun, Chief Economist and Director General from the Banque de France for a Business Talk on Wednesday, 7^th October .

The talk will start at 12.45 pm in the Amphi MI-V Isaac (Manufacture des Tabacs) 

Xavier Debrun will talk about Public Debt at Risk : A Parsimonious Framework

Here is a short abstract of the talk :

We propose an applied stochastic simulation framework for generating public debt sustainability assessments. The framework is grounded in a parsimonious, reduced-form empirical model that jointly captures the dynamic interactions among economic growth, public borrowing, central bank operations, debt accumulation, the primary fiscal balance, and the exchange rate. By embedding a fiscal reaction function directly into the model, and estimating parameter and shock uncertainty using bootstrapped distributions, the model supports internally consistent forecasts of public debt paths. This allows for the construction of probabilistically meaningful fan charts and the estimation of “debt-at-risk” defined as the highest debt ratio likely to materialize within a specific probability range over 1 to 5 years. Our approach addresses recent critiques, such as Bernanke’s 2024 assessment of the Bank of England’s scenario-driven fan charts. We do so by eliminating judgment-based inputs and grounding forecast uncertainty in both the estimated economic structure and innovations. This framework aims at strengthening the analytical credibility of fan charts and provides a transparent, replicable, risk-based approach to fiscal forecasting and policy design.

In order to attend this talk, please register via this form :  https://formulaire.ut-capitole.fr/index.php/837526?lang=en

Please arrive 10 minutes before so we can check your registration, as the talk will start promptly at 12:45 pm.

Open to students from A1 to PhD level.