This paper explores the relationship between sovereign risk and banking risk during the European sovereign debt crisis in May 2010. We link banks’ stock returns and CDS rates to sovereign CDS rates, to examine the spillover of sovereign risk to the banking system in the EU. More specifically,...

This paper studies fiscal policy in a model of sovereign debt and default. A time inconsistency problem arises: since the price of past debt cannot be affected by current fiscal policy and governments cannot credibly commit to a certain path of tax rates, debtor countries choose suboptimally low...

A vast and growing empirical literature aims at identifying key determinants of sovereign default. The literature is extensive and controversial. Can policy-makers use this body of research to learn anything that can help reduce the likelihood of sovereign default? We use a variant of Extreme...

The stock of sovereign debt is typically measured at face value. Defined as the undiscounted sum of future principal repayments, face values are misleading when debts are issued with different contractual forms or maturities. In this paper, we construct alternative measures of the stock of...

In a setting where the lender and the borrower have heterogeneous beliefs about the likelihood of a disastrous shock to the borrower's economy, we study the debt contract that defaults at the occurrence of that shock, as proposed by Barro (2006). We find that a higher belief by the lender...

Contingent sovereign debt has the potential to create important welfare gains--but actual issuance is rare. Using hand-collected archival data, we examine the first known case of large-scale issuance of contingent sovereign debt in history. Philip II of Spain entered into hundreds of contracts...

As a result of the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), Chile conquered Peruvian and Bolivian territories rich in nitrates and guano. We conduct econometric tests for structural breaks in the time series of the government bonds for Chile and Peru between 1876 and 1890 in order to examine the...

We distinguish two attitudes towards debt. The attitude of prudent borrowers, which attempt to stabilize their debts to low levels, even in the event of a bad shock, and what we call, after Krugman, "Panglossian" borrowers, which only focus on the best of their growth prospects, and rationally...

In the last two decades, the private sector has contracted a substantially larger share in the total amount of foreign-currency international debt (private sector share of external debt), especially in developing countries. In this paper, I empirically examine the effect of this phenomenon on...

Does improving creditor coordination by strengthening CACs lead to efficiency gains in the functioning of sovereign bond markets? We address this question in a model featuring both debtor moral hazard and creditor coordination under incomplete information. Conditional on default, we characterize...