We develop a dynamic recursive model where political and economic decisions interact, to study how excessive debt-GDP ratios affect political sustainability of prudent fiscal policies. Rent seeking groups make political decisions - to cooperate (or not) - on the allocation of fiscal budgets...

We provide a new measure of sovereign country risk exposure to global sovereign tail risk (SCRE) based on information incorporated in 5-year sovereign CDS spreads. Our panel regressions with quarterly data from 53 countries show that macro risks have strong explanatory power for SCRE. After...

This paper surveys the literature on sovereign debt from the perspective of understanding how sovereign debt differs from privately issue debt, and why sovereign debt is deemed safe in some countries but risky in others. The answers relate to the unique power of the sovereign. One the one hand,...

Credit rating agencies are frequently criticized for producing biased sovereign ratings. This article discusses how the home country of rating agencies could affect rating decisions as a result of political economy influences and cultural distance. Using data from nine agencies based in six...

Alle drei großen Ratingagenturen Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s und Fitch haben Griechenland, Irland, Portugal und Spanien während der europäischen Finanzmarkt- und Staatsschuldenkrise signifikant benachteiligt. Dies lässt sich nur zu einem geringen Teil auf objektive Fundamentaldaten...

This paper examines whether the Big Three credit rating agencies actually played as active a role in the Euro Crisis as previously asserted. On the basis of panel data methods for a set of 11 EMU countries, the analysis reveals significant evidence for an arbitrary markup on the GIPS group 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 status-quo relates to delayed defaults and...

Credit rating agencies are frequently criticized for producing sovereign ratings that do not accurately reflect the economic and political fundamentals of rated countries. This article discusses how the home country of rating agencies could affect rating decisions as a result of political...

This paper examines how domestic holdings of government debt affect sovereign default risk and government debt management. I develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with both external and domestic debt that endogenously generates output contraction upon default. Domestic holdings...

This paper estimates the cost of sovereign default by using novel econometric methods - dynamic local projections applied to a sample that is re-randomised using inverse propensity score weights. We find that the impact of default on output is negative, significant and persistent - around 2.8%...