Growth in a time of debt

Commentary

 * Summary of conclusions:
 * Data: Unbalanced panel of 44 countries over more than a century.
 * Finding: When government debt gets to or above a threshhold of 90% of annual GDP there is a noticeable negtive effect on GDP.
 * Contradictory study "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff" shows that the data set in the original paper mistakenly excluded five influential observation-countries and this widely-cited conclusion is not strongly shown in the full data. There was a lot of commentary on this including this blog post in Retraction Watch.