The controversy about sovereign debt cuts loomed prominently throughout crisis in the European Union (EU), as the EU legal rules were viewed to impose strict limitations on debt restructuring involving public creditors due to moral hazard concerns enshrined in the legal ban on bailouts. This...

This paper focuses on the debt recovery channel linking the dynamics of public debt to partial sovereign defaults. We build a simple model which incorporates sovereign default and a debt recovery rule. It depends on a parameter that allows for partial debt recovery. We show that the maximum...

The price of a safe asset reflects not only the expected discounted future cash flows but also future service flows, since retrading allows partial insurance of idiosyncratic risk in an incomplete markets setting. This lowers the issuers’ interest burden and allows the government to run a...

There have been criticisms of debt sustainability analysis in general, including the IMF’s own evaluation of the usefulness of its debt sustainability methodology (e.g., IMF, 2017). This paper’s focus is narrow. On the basis of theoretical arguments and empirical evidence, it argues that the...

Rising public debt everywhere has raised the question of how to reduce debt again in the future. High public debt also seems to be an impediment for the exit of central banks from ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing. Historical precedents and proposals have included austerity,...

How will sovereign debt markets evolve in the 21st century? We survey how the literature has responded to the eurozone debt crisis, placing “lessons learned” in historical perspective. The crisis featured: (i) the return of debt problems to advanced economies; (ii) a bank-sovereign...

For emerging economies, borrowing abroad is a double-edged sword: it can buffer against adverse economic shocks and smooth their domestic consumption; however, it can also amplify volatility in consumption, depending on the currency in which the debt is denominated and cyclicality in the...

Sovereign governments owe debt to many foreign creditors and can choose which creditors to favor when making payments. This paper documents the de facto seniority structure of sovereign debt using new data on defaults (missed payments or arrears) and creditor losses in debt restructuring...

This paper first searches for the drivers of the Greek depression in the aftermath of the 2007-8 global crisis and in turn looks for engines of sustained growth. We use a micro-founded macroeconomic model calibrated to Greece. Our simulations show that the adopted adjustment program (namely, the...

What went wrong? Why did seemingly rational bond investors continue to purchase Puerto Rican debt with only a modest risk premium, even though the macroeconomic fundamentals were dismal? Why did financial markets fail to exercise market discipline and restrict capital flows to Puerto Rico? Given...