This article presents and critically evaluates the Greek sovereign defaults and puts them into historical perspective. More specifically, each of the four defaults of the Greek State (1827, 1843, 1893 and 1932) was not an isolated episode in the turbulent economic history of capitalism, but...

A key precursor of twentieth-century financial crises in emerging and advanced economies alike was the rapid buildup of leverage. Those emerging economies that avoided leverage booms during the 2000s also were most likely to avoid the worst effects of the twenty-first century’s first global...

I construct a model of a small open economy in which government spending is necessary to mitigate transaction cost. This provides a simple raison d’etre for a government and generates features many sovereign default models do not have: taxes and government spending. Even though the government...

In this essay we review the empirical literature about sovereign debt and default. As we survey the work of economists, historians, and political scientists, we also emphasize parallel developments by theorists and recommend steps to improve the correspondence between theory and data.

The main motivation of this paper is to study the impact of the composition of creditors on the probability of default and the risk premium on sovereign bonds, when there is debtor moral hazard. In the absence of any legal enforcement, relational contracts work only when there are creditors who...

This paper presents a model where governments need loans to finance reforms and may misuse these funds for consumption without immediately exposing this to its lenders. Such a misuse is ultimately followed by a sovereign default, therefore lenders will try to discipline governments in favor of...

This paper uses the rules of engineering as a rhetorical device to discuss why the international financial architecture needs a structured mechanism for dealing with sovereign insolvency. The paper suggests that the most important problem with the statusquo relates to delayed defaults and...

In this paper, the author considers the sovereign debt in the form of one-period government bonds with default risk, which can be purchased by and traded among domestic and foreign investors. She shows that the weight assigned to the lenders' interest by the borrowing government at the time of...

We analyze holdings of public bonds by over 20,000 banks in 191 countries, and the role of these bonds in 20 sovereign defaults over 1998-2012. Banks hold many public bonds (on average 9% of their assets), particularly in less financially-developed countries. During sovereign defaults, exposure...

This paper studies the bank-sovereign link in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium set-up with strategic default on public debt. Heterogeneous banks give rise to an interbank market where government bonds are used as collateral. A default penalty arises from a breakdown of interbank...