What determines the ability of low-income developing countries to issue bonds in international capital and what explains the spreads on these bonds? This paper examines these questions using a dataset that includes emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs) that issued sovereign bonds at...

We re-assess the view that sovereigns with a history of default are charged only a small and/or short-lived premium on the interest rate warranted by observed fundamentals. Our reassessment uses a metric of such a 'default premium' (DP) that is consistent with asymmetric information models and...

We analyze how concerns for model misspecification on the part of international lenders affect the desirability of issuing state-contingent debt instruments in a standard sovereign default model a la Eaton and Gersovitz (1981). We show that for the commonly used threshold state-contingent bond...

We analyze the long-run impact of emerging-market sovereign bond yields on corporate bond yields, finding that the average pass-through is around one. The pass-through is larger in countries with greater sovereign risks and where sovereign bonds are more liquid. It is also greater for corporate...

Korea's stars tell of an economy saddled with a real neutral rate (r-star) that has declined significantly in recent decades and is currently below zero. This reflects a significant decline in trend growth, and two large financial crises that triggered significant shifts in the saving-investment...