Financial crises are costly. In the recent crisis in Argentina, for example, from the onset of sovereign debt repayment difficulties at the end of 2000 until the beginning of 2002, real GDP dropped by almost 20%. A simple aggregate growth accounting exercise suggests that a large part of this...

This paper analyzes a general equilibrium model with limited commitment and production. There are a large number of infinitely-lived, risk-averse agents who invest in physical and human capital, and production exhibits constant-returns-to-scale with respect to these two input factors....

In this paper, we use data from developing countries to argue that sovereign defaults are often caused by fiscal pressures generated by large-scale domestic defaults. We argue that these systemic domestic defaults are caused by shocks best interpreted as being non-fundamental. We construct a...

We build a dynamic model of international borrowing and default that can rationalize the dynamics of spread and the maturity composition of debt in the data. The spread curve reflects the dynamics of the endogenous probability of default that is persistent yet mean reverting because of the...