The COVID-19 epidemic in emerging markets risks a combined health, economic, and debt crisis. We integrate a standard epidemiology model into a sovereign default model and study how default risk impacts the ability of these countries to respond to the epidemic. Lockdown policies are useful for...

This paper compares the equilibrium dynamics of an economy facing an aggregate collateral constraint on external debt to the dynamics of an economy facing a collateral constraint imposed at the level of each individual agent. The aggregate collateral constraint is intended to capture an...

We document that governments whose local currency debt provides them with greater hedging benefits actually borrow more in foreign currency. We introduce two features into a government's debt portfolio choice problem to explain this finding: risk-averse lenders and lack of monetary policy...

This study quantitatively investigates the currency composition of sovereign debt in the presence of two types of limited enforcement frictions arising from a government's monetary and debt policy: strategic currency debasement and default on sovereign debt. Local currency debt obligations are...

In 1841 and 1842, eight states and the Territory of Florida defaulted on their sovereign debts. Traditional histories of the default crisis have stressed the causal role of the depression that began with the Panic of 1837, unexpected revenue shortfalls from canal and bank investments as a result...

The stock of sovereign debt is typically measured at face value. This is a misleading indicator when debts are issued with different contractual forms. In this paper we construct a new measure of the stock of external sovereign debt for 100 developing countries from 1979 to 2006 that is...

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...

In this paper, we use data from developing countries to argue that sovereign defaults are often caused by fiscal pressures generated by large-scale domestic defaults. We argue that these systemic domestic defaults are caused by shocks best interpreted as being non-fundamental. We construct a...

In this paper I analyze the relationship between fiscal policy, aggregate public sector debt sustainability, and debt relief. I develop a methodology to compute the fiscal policy path that is compatible with aggregate debt sustainability in the post-HIPC era. The model explicitly considers the...

We show that across developing countries, external debt to private creditors rises more than proportionately with income. We then develop a simple theoretical model consistent with this phenomenon and also consistent with the well-documented relationship between capital market development and...