What are the macroeconomic implications of changes in sovereign risk premia? In this paper, I use a novel identification strategy coupled with a new dataset for the Euro Area to answer this question. I show that exogenous innovations in sovereign risk premia were an important driver of the...

This paper presents a stylized model of international trade and asset price bubbles. Its central insight is that bubbles tend to appear and expand in countries where productivity is low relative to the rest of the world. These bubbles absorb local savings, eliminating inefficient investments and...

Collective action clauses (CACs) are provisions specifying that a supermajority of bondholders can change the terms of a bond. We study how CACs determine governments' fiscal incentives, sovereign bond prices and default probabilities in environments with and without contingent debt and IMF...

We study the mechanisms through which the adoption of the Euro delayed, rather than advanced, economic reforms in the Euro zone periphery and led to the deterioration of important institutions in these countries. We show that the abandonment of the reform process and the institutional...

The present paper shows that secondary markets can ameliorate, and sometimes fully solve, problems of sovereign risk in international financial markets. We study two environments. In the first one, private agents can in principle issue a complete set of state-contingent securities but...

In the last two decades, financial integration has increased dramatically across the world. At the same time, the fraction of countries in default has more than doubled. Contrary to theory, however, there appears to have been no substantial improvement in the degree of international risk...

This paper presents a model of financial resource curse, i.e. episodes of abundant access to foreign capital coupled with weak productivity growth. We study a two-sector, tradable and non-tradable, small open economy. The tradable sector is the engine of growth, and productivity growth is...

One possible explanation for the unsatisfactory implementation of IMF conditionality has been attributed to the lack of credibility of the IMF threat of interrupting financial assistance in case of non compliance with the negotiated conditions. In this paper we suggest that such lack of...