I analyze how lack of commitment affects the maturity structure of sovereign debt. Ex post, the government trades off the gains from default induced redistribution against the cost of defaulting. Ex ante, the government issues debt of various maturities to raise an exogenous revenue requirement....

Governments in emerging markets often behave like a "tormented insurer", trying to use non-state-contingent debt instruments to avoid sharp adjustments in their payments to private agents despite sharp fluctuations in public revenues. In the data, their ability to sustain debt is inversely...

The purpose of this paper is to determine the normative and positive implications for fiscal policy in a weakly institutionalized economy which is not managed by a benevolent government, but is managed by a selfish dictator. We examine an economy with no capital, with fully state contingent...

In this paper we address the time-inconsistency of optimal debt policy—the incentive for a current government to “manipulate interest ratesâ€â€”raised in Lucas and Stokey’s celebrated 1983 paper. The literature that followed suggested various ways to fully overcome...

This paper combines default, settlement, and repayment history into a unified, dynamic borrowing model of sovereign debt. The model addresses two questions: 1) how the level of debt and the income profile affect the length of time a country in default is excluded from the international credit...

This paper builds a dynamic model of borrowing and default to study the term structure of sovereign bonds in emerging markets. The borrower in the model can buy short and long bonds at contingent prices that reflect the timing of default events. The model generates a yield curve that is upward...

This paper solves the pricing problem of an merging market debt contract in which the borrower’s economy is subject to rare event risk. Our model combines elements of a reduced form and a structural model of debt pricing. Rare event risk is modeled as a sudden event in fundamentals, and...

I study the constrained efficient allocations of a simple model of risk sharing and capital flows across countries assuming that each country cannot commit to fully repay its contract obligations. In the model, the degree of risk sharing and the amount of investment are interdependent. It is...