The abelian monodromy extension property for families of curves

Necessary and sufficient conditions are given (in terms of monodromy) for extending a family of smooth curves over an open subset to a family of stable curves over S. More precisely, we introduce the abelian monodromy extension (AME) property and show that the standard Deligne–Mumford compactification is the unique, maximal AME compactification of the moduli space of curves. We also show that the Baily–Borel compactification is the unique, maximal projective AME compactification of the moduli space of abelian varieties.