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 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...

We construct a financial vulnerability indicator that is consistent with the theoretical literature on determinants of defaults. It is based on the amount of new foreign financing that is needed to avoid a default or an import adjustment, expressed as a proportion of the country''s sources of...

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...

This paper proposes a new framework for the analysis of public sector debt sustainability. The framework uses concepts and methods from modern practice of contingent claims to develop a quantitative risk-based model of sovereign credit risk. The motivation in developing this framework is to...

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, debt levels in emerging and developing economies have surged raising concerns about fiscal sustainability. Historically, negative interest-growth differentials in these countries have played a debt-stabilizing role. But is this enough to prevent countries...

We introduce a new suite of macroeconomic models that extend and complement the Debt, Investment, and Growth (DIG) model widely used at the IMF since 2012. The new DIG-Labor models feature segmented labor markets, efficiency wages and open unemployment, and an informal non-agricultural sector....

This paper focuses on the debt build-up that frontier low-income developing countries (LIDCs) have faced since 2012. First, it documents a 20-percentage point increase in the external and government debt-to-GDP ratios, a composition shift toward higher non-concessional debt, and a rise in...

This paper describes the compilation of the Global Debt Database (GDD), a cutting-edge dataset covering private and public debt for virtually the entire world (190 countries) dating back to the 1950s. The GDD is the result of a multiyear investigative process that started with the October 2016...

This paper studies the relationship between banks' holdings of domestic sovereign securities and credit growth to the private sector in emerging market and developing economies. Higher banks' holdings of government debt are associated with a lower credit growth to the private sector and with a...