Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff

The provided assets are the source code of the conducted experiments in the publication "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff" written by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin. The assets were retrieved from following URL:

https://www.peri.umass.edu/images/WP322HAP-RR-GITD-code-2013-05-17.zip

Modifications to the original content:

The provided zip file was unzipped and the internal folder structure was flattened (i.e. the files RR-200.R and RR-200.Rout were moved to the root level of the archive)

Information Text from the website of the University of Massachusetts Amherst:

Herndon, Ash and Pollin replicate Reinhart and Rogoffand find that coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics lead to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and GDP growth among 20 advanced economies in the post-war period. They find that when properly calculated, the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public-debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent, not -0:1 percent as published in Reinhart and Rogoff. That is, contrary to RR, average GDP growth at public debt/GDP ratios over 90 percent is not dramatically different than when debt/GDP ratios are lower.

The authors also show how the relationship between public debt and GDP growth varies significantly by time period and country. Overall, the evidence we review contradicts Reinhart and Rogoff's claim to have identified an important stylized fact, that public debt loads greater than 90 percent of GDP consistently reduce GDP growth.