Sovereign debt restructurings are associated with declines in GDP, investment, bank credit, and capital flows. The transmission channels and associated output and banking sector costs depend on whether the restructuring takes place preemptively, without missing payments to creditors, or whether...

How do oil price movements affect sovereign spreads in an oil-dependent economy? I develop a stochastic general equilibrium model of an economy exposed to co-moving oil price and output processes, with endogenous sovereign default risk. The model explains a large proportion of business cycle...

Public and private sector balance sheets are an important component to any analysis of debt sustainability. A vulnerable and indebted private sector can become a sudden liability for the government; alternatively, resilient household and bank balance sheets may reveal potential sources of...

Improving debt management capacity in Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) is a key element of the international community’s strategy for ensuring a robust and sustained exit from unsustainable debt burdens. External debt management is a multi-facetted task involving the formulation of a...

We analyse the debt dynamics in countries that benefited from the HIPC/MDRI debt relief initiatives with a view to applying a probabilistic approach to estimating future debt paths for those countries. We extend the probabilistic approach to public debt sustainability analysis (DSA) proposed by...

The insensitivity of sovereign loan secondary market returns to macroeconomic fundamentals has been attributed to market illiquidity and the absence of publicly reported transactional prices. During the 1920s and 1930s sovereign bonds were traded in an active market and weekly transactional...

This note examines the efficiency gains that might result from market-based debt reduction and alternative uses of resources. It is argued that when a country’s expected output falls short of contractual claims on that output, private investment is drawn to activities that protect the...

A new aggregation scheme used to measure the sources of fiscal financing of indebted countries suggests that there was a fundamental improvement in the seniority of domestic debt at the expense of foreign bank debt during the late 1980s. We argue that this was the revenue maximizing response of...

This paper studies the role of IMF-supported programs in mitigating the likelihood of subsequent sovereign defaults in borrowing countries. Using a panel of 106 developing countries from 1970 to 2016 and an entropy balancing methodology, we find that IMF-supported programs significantly reduce...

As a response to economic crises triggered by COVID-19, sovereign debt standstill proposals emphasize debt payment suspensions without haircuts on the face value of debt obligations. We quantify the effects of standstills using a standard default model. We find that a one-year standstill...