How reliable are public debt statistics? This paper quantifies the magnitude, characteristics, and timing of hidden debt by tracking ex post data revisions across a comprehensive new database of more than 50 vintages of World Bank debt statistics. In a sample of debt data covering 146 countries...

The European Central Bank is unique in setting monetary policy for several sovereign states with heterogeneous debt levels and different maturity structures. The monetary-fiscal nexus is central to the functioning of the euro area. We focus on one particular aspect of that nexus, the effect the...

Advanced economies borrowed substantially during the Covid recession to fund their fiscal policy. The Covid recession differed from the Great Recession in that sovereign debt markets remained calm and spreads barely responded. We study the experience of Greece, the most extreme manifestation of...

A large literature has developed quantitative versions of the Eaton and Gersovitz (1981) model to analyze default episodes on external debt. In this paper, we study whether the same framework can be applied to the analysis of debt crises in which domestic public debt plays a prominent role. We...

This paper shows that the inability to use monetary policy for macroeconomic stabilization leaves a government more vulnerable to a rollover crisis. We study a sovereign default model with self-fulfilling rollover crises, foreign currency debt, and nominal rigidities. When the government lacks...

We propose a simple model of the sovereign-bank diabolic loop, and establish four results. First, the diabolic loop can be avoided by restricting banks domestic sovereign exposures relative to their equity. Second, equity requirements can be lowered if banks only hold senior domestic sovereign...

The recent debt crises in Europe and the U.S. states feature similar sharp increases in spreads on government debt but also show important differences. In Europe, the crisis occurred at high government indebtedness levels and had spillovers to the private sector. In the United States, state...