Using a central bank legislation database, this paper documents and analyzes worldwide institutional arrangements for central bank lending to the government and identifies international practices. Key findings are: (i) in most advanced countries, central banks do not finance government...

This paper mines the experience of capital markets during the 19th century to propose an alternative way of interpreting international default episodes. The standard view is that defaulting on sovereign debt entails exclusion from capital markets. Yet we have observed multiple instances of...

This paper studies under what circumstances creditworthy sovereign borrowers may be denied liquidity by rational creditors. It is shown that, when the creditor side of the market consists of many small investors there may be multiple rational expectations equilibria. In one equilibrium,...

The pandemic has urged countries around the globe to mobilize financing to support the recovery. This is even more relevant in Central America, where the policy response to cushion the pandemic's economic and social impact has accentuated pre-existing debt vulnerabilities. This paper documents...

Sovereign debt restructurings are perceived as inflicting large losses to bondholders. However, many bonds feature high coupons and often exhibit strong post-crisis recoveries. To account for these aspects, we analyze the long-term returns of sovereign bonds during 32 crises since 1998, taking...

The last decade or so has seen a mushrooming of new sovereign debt databases covering long time spans for several countries. This represents an important breakthrough for economists who have long sought to, but been unable to tackle, first-order questions such as why countries have differential...

This paper discusses the challenging question of whether central banks should use treasury bills or central bank bills for draining excess liquidity in the banking system. While recognizing that there are practical reasons for using central bank bills, the paper argues that treasury bills are...

In an indirect monetary policy framework, open market operations become the central bank’s main instrument. In the initial stages, when financial markets are still undeveloped, selection of a financial instrument for those operations and the design of supporting arrangements to ensure the...

Motivated by the recent increase in domestic banks' holdings of domestic sovereign debt (i.e., home bias) in the European periphery, this paper analyzes implications of banks' home bias for the sovereign's debt sustainability. The main findings, based on a sample of advanced (AM) and emerging...