The European sovereign debt crisis is characterized by the simultaneous surge in borrowing costs in the GIPS countries after 2008. We present a theory, which can account for the behavior of sovereign bond spreads in Southern Europe between 1998 and 2012. Our key theoretical argument is related...

We present a simple model of sovereign debt crises in which a country chooses its optimal mix of short and long-term debt contracts subject to standard contracting frictions: the country cannot commit to repay its debts nor to a specific path of future debt issues, and contracts cannot be made...

While the current account of euro area as a whole has remained almost balanced in the past two decades, several member countries have sizeable deficits or surpluses. In this paper, we interpret these imbalances as indicators of net capital flows among the euro-area countries and show that these...

How does a country’s choice of exchange rate regime impact its ability to borrow from abroad? We build a small open economy model in which the government can potentially respond to shocks via domestic monetary policy and by international borrowing. We assume that debt repayment must be...

The development of government bond markets and, in particular, their currency composition have recently received much interest, partly because of their relation with financial crises. This Paper studies determinants of the size and currency composition of government bond markets for a panel of...

When Argentine sovereign default in December 2001 led to a collapse of the peso, the burden of dollar debt became demonstrably unsustainable. But it was not clear what restructuring was feasible, nor when. Eventually, in 2005 after a delay of more than three years, a supermajority of creditors...

The international financial system has been the subject of much debate following the financial crises of the 1990s. While many reforms have been proposed for and implemented by mostly developing countries, few changes have been made to the international financial system itself. Fundamentally,...

The Paper sets out the principles that should underlie sovereign debt restructuring. It argues for a rules-based approach to achieve private sector involvement in restructuring. The rules must operate, however, in the context of an appropriate institutional framework with appropriate incentives....

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...