This paper studies whether countries benefit from servicing their debts during times of widespread sovereign defaults. Colombia is typically regarded as the only large Latin American country that did not default in the 1980s. Using archival research and formal econometric estimates of Colombia's...

This paper explores the causes and consequences of fiscal dominance over monetary policy in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Fiscal dominance has always been a pressing problem as it can contribute to inflation and macroeconomic instability, and increasingly so as fiscal deficits and public debt are...

Globally, financial institutions have increased their holdings of domestic sovereign debt, tightening the linkage between the health of the financial system and the level of sovereign debt, or the "financial sector-sovereign nexus," during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In South Africa, the...

This article surveys the literature on sovereign debt sustainability from its origins in the mid-1980s to the present, focusing on four debates. First, the shift from an "accounting based" view of debt sustainability, evaluated using government borrowing rates, to a "model based" view which uses...

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...

This paper examines the causes, processes, and outcomes of Barbados' 2018-19 sovereign debt restructuring-its first ever. The restructuring was comprehensive, featuring several rarely used approaches, including the restructuring of treasury bills, and the use of a retrofitted collective action...

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...

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...

In 2007, countries in the Euro periphery were enjoying stable growth, low deficits, and low spreads. Then the financial crisis erupted and pushed them into deep recessions, raising their deficits and debt levels. By 2010, they were facing severe debt problems. Spreads increased and,...

The past several years of recession and slow recovery have raised much interest on the effect of fiscal stimulus on economic activity, even as high public debts in many countries would call for fiscal consolidation. To evaluate the delicate balance between stimulus and consolidation requires...