This Chartbook provides a pictorial history, on a country-by-country basis, of public debt and economic crises of various forms. It is a timeline of a country's creditworthiness and financial turmoil. The analysis, narrative, and illustrations in Reinhart and Rogoff (2009), This Time is...

This paper uses a data set of over two hundred years of sovereign debt, banking and inflation crises to explore the question of how long it takes a country to "graduate" from the typical pattern of serial crisis that most emerging markets experience. We find that for default and inflation...

We study sovereign external debt crises over the past 200 years, with a focus on creditor losses, or "haircuts". Our sample covers 327 sovereign debt restructurings with external private creditors over 205 default spells since 1815. Creditor losses vary widely (from none to 100%), but the...

Two centuries of Greek debt crises highlight the pitfalls of relying on external financing. Since its independence in 1829, the Greek government has defaulted four times on its external creditors - with striking historical parallels. Each crisis is preceded by a period of heavy borrowing from...

Financial repression can be used to avoid a government default when fiscal policy is constrained. We present a model showing that optimal financial repression progresses through successive stages with increasing levels of distortion. Data from advanced economies suggest that the initial stage of...

World capital markets have experienced large scale sovereign defaults on a number of occasions, the most recent being Argentina's default in 2002. In this paper we develop a quantitative model of debt and default in a small open economy. We use this model to match four empirical regularities...