A surprisingly large number of countries have been able to finance a significant fraction of domestic investment using foreign finance for extended periods. While many of these episodes are in low-income countries where official finance is more important than private finance, this paper also...

This paper surveys recent economic and legal literature on sovereign debt in light of the COVID-19 shock. Most of the core theoretical contributions we review across the two disciplines hinge on immunity, and the sovereign borrower’s consequent inability to commit to repay foreign creditors,...

Few would dispute that sovereign defaults entail significant economic costs, including, most notably, important output losses. However, most of the evidence supporting this conventional wisdom, based on annual observations, suffers from serious measurement and identification problems. To address...

This paper shows that budget deficits account for a relatively small fraction of debt growth and that stock-flow reconciliation, which is often considered a residual entity, is one of the key determinants of debt dynamics. After having explained the importance of the stock-flow reconciliation,...