Troy Davig, "Periodically Expanding Discounted Debt: A Threat to Fiscal Policy Sustainability?", Journal of Applied Econometrics, Vol. 20, No. 7, 2005, pp. 829-840. All data are in the file dtdata.txt, which is a plain ASCII file. The file dtprogs.zip contains four Matlab program files. These are ASCII files in DOS format; Unix users should use "unzip -a". The data used in this study are annual from 1960-1999 and consist of adjusted measures of the official level of debt (as reported in Table FF0-1 in the Treasury Bulletin), a series of discounted debt, and the primary surplus for the U.S. Federal government. Adjustments to the official series for debt and the primary surplus follow Hamilton and Flavin (AER, 1986), and construction of the discounted debt series follows Wilcox (JMCB, 1989). All data are in millions of 1982-1984 dollars and are arranged in columns,where the first column gives the year. primary_surplus : primary surplus (column 2) undisc_debt : debt (column 3) disc_debt : discounted debt (column 4) Note: The value of discounted debt in 1999 was not available at the time the study was conducted (since it required data from 2000 to construct the discount factor). Troy Davig tadav3 wm.edu