I analyze how lack of commitment affects the maturity structure of sovereign debt. Governments balance benefits of default induced redistribution and costs due to income losses in the wake of a default. Their choice of short- versus long-term debt affects default and rollover decisions by...

I analyze how lack of commitment affects the maturity structure of sovereign debt. Governments balance benefits of default induced redistribution and costs due to income losses in the wake of a default. Their choice of short- versus long- term debt affects default and rollover decisions by...

Political risk is a significant determinant of bond yields and economic growth in both developed and emerging markets and we develop a debt sustainability analysis model with both channels using a country ratings proxy of political risk. Political risk also affects a sovereign's willingness to...

Political risk is a significant determinant of sovereign debt dynamics. We estimate the sensitivity of bond yields and economic growth to a country-level broad proxy of political risk and develop a stochastic debt sustainability analysis optimization model with both yields and growth channels to...

Does fiscal austerity influence sovereign debt spreads in a state-dependent manner? To investigate this, we develop an endogenous sovereign default model that incorporates long-maturity debt, fiscal rules, and investment. We uncover novel insights in the Greek default. First, our model provides...

The euro-area sovereign debt crisis is receding. Europe is on a recovery path, growth is broad-based and unemployment is falling. One after the other, countries hit hardest by the crisis are exiting their adjustment programmes. However, debt remains high in most countries and future debt crises...

Sovereign state-contingent bonds, in particular growth-indexed bonds (GIBs), have rarely been issued in practice despite their theoretical benefits. This paper provides support for this apparent sovereign noncontingency puzzle by deriving the impact of GIBs on the upper tail of the distribution...

We model the super-replication of payoffs linked to a country's GDP as a stochastic linear program on a discrete time and state-space scenario tree to price GDP-linked bonds. As a by-product of the model we obtain a hedging portfolio. Using linear programming duality we compute also the risk...

We model the super-replication of payoffs linked to a country's GDP as a stochastic linear program on a discrete time and state-space scenario tree to price GDP-linked bonds. As a byproduct of the model, we obtain a hedging portfolio. Using linear programming duality we also compute the risk...

We develop models for portfolio diversification in the sovereign credit default swap (CDS) markets and show that, despite literature findings that sovereign CDS spreads are affected by global factors, there is sufficient idiosyncratic risk to be diversified away. However, we identify regime...