This paper studies the maturity and stream of payments of sovereign debt. Using Bloomberg bond data for eleven emerging … economies, we document that countries react to crises by issuing debt with shortened maturity but back-load payment schedules …. To account for this pattern, we develop a sovereign default model with an endogenous choice of debt maturity and payment …

maturity management, as will typically be required to address rollover crisis risk, will be delayed until the end of the …

maturity in the event of crises, and show that both necessarily improve ex ante welfare if they do not decrease expected …

maturity. But at high levels of debt, a strong inverse relation emerges. We start the paper by documenting this inverse … relation for those OECD Countries which have reached very high levels of debt. We then provide a theory of the joint movements … of debt and maturity which can explain both sets of facts. It is based on the idea that, at high levels of debt, the …