The present paper shows that secondary markets can ameliorate, and sometimes fully solve, problems of sovereign risk in international financial markets. We study two environments. In the first one, private agents can in principle issue a complete set of state-contingent securities but...

Conventional wisdom says that, in the absence of default penalties, sovereign risk destroys all foreign asset trade. We show that this conventional wisdom rests on one implicit assumption: that assets cannot be retraded in secondary markets. Without this assumption, foreign asset trade is...

As a result of debt enforcement problems, many high-productivity firms in emerging economies are unable to pledge enough future profits to their creditors and this constrains the financing they can raise. Many have argued that, by relaxing these credit constraints, reforms that strengthen...