Sovereign governments owe debt to many foreign creditors and can choose which creditors to favor when making payments. This paper documents the de facto seniority structure of sovereign debt using new data on defaults (missed payments or arrears) and creditor losses in debt restructuring...

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...

The sharp, secular decline in the world real interest rate of the past thirty years suggests that the surge in global demand for financial assets outpaced the growth in their supply. We argue that this phenomenon was driven by: (i) faster growth in emerging markets, (ii) changes in the financial...

Governments tend to increase their borrowing at the same time, giving rise to a global fiscal cycle. This global fiscal cycle has a large component that is unexplained by global business cycle variables. We propose a novel explanation for the emergence of the global fiscal cycle: governments'...

The purpose of this paper is to compare the pricing of bank loans and bonds in international markets. The results obtained, using data on LDC debtors, indicate that in both markets the country risk premium has responded to some of the variables suggested by the theory. However, the way in which...

It is now well documented that capital flight has been a dominant feature of capital movements between developing and industrial countries. Since 1988 reductions in the stock of flight capital more than account for private capital flows to emerging markets. This suggests that what appears to be...

Debt in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) is at its highest level in half a century. In about nine out of 10 EMDEs, debt is higher now than it was in 2010 and, in half of the EMDEs, debt is more than 30 percentage points of gross domestic product higher. Historically, elevated...

How is a developing country affected by its odious government's ability to borrow in international markets? We examine the dynamics of a country's growth, consumption, and sovereign debt, assuming that the government is myopic and wants to maximize short-term, socially unproductive, spending....

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...

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...