We study the optimal accumulation of international reserves in a quantitative model of sovereign default with long-term debt and a risk-free asset. Keeping higher levels of reserves provides a hedge against rollover risk, but this is costly because using reserves to pay down debt allows the...

Two striking facts about international capital flows in emerging economies motivate this paper: (1) Governments hold large amounts of international reserves, for which they obtain a return lower than their borrowing cost. (2) Purchases of domestic assets by nonresidents and purchases of foreign...

This paper provides a theoretical framework to quantitatively investigate the optimal accumulation of international reserves to hedge against rollover risk. We study a dynamic model of endogenous default in which the government faces a tradeoff between the insurance benefits of reserves with the...