This book challenges the prevalent assumption that sovereign debt must be repaid — even after a major regime change — in order to maintain country creditworthiness. It argues that this conventional wisdom is overly simplistic and in some cases entirely wrong, and contends that its underlying...

International financial institutions (IFIs) generally enjoy preferred creditors treatment (PCT). Although PCT rarely appears in legal contracts, when sovereigns restructure bilateral or commercial debts, they normally pay IFIs in full. This paper presents a model where a creditor, such as an...

We estimate a canonical sovereign default model from Arellano (2008) for Argentina via maximum simulated likelihood estimation to understand how well it performs in terms of predicting default events. The estimated model accounts for the overall default patterns of Argentina and closely matches...

We explore whether foreign aid affects developing countries' creditworthiness, as proxied by the Institutional Investor's measure of country credit risk. Based on a simple model of international borrowing and lending, we develop the hypothesis that current aid reduces the likelihood of future...

Official lenders provide financial assistance to countries that face sovereign debt crisis. The availability of financial assistance has counteracting effects on the default incentives of governments. On the one hand, financial assistance can help to avoid defaults by bridging times of...

We investigate the nature of sovereign credit risk for selected Asian and European countries based on a set of sovereign CDS data over an eight-year period that includes the episode of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. The principal component analysis results indicate that there exists...

We construct a model of FDI, risk and aid, where a country loses access to FDI and aid if the country expropriates FDI. We show that: (i) The threat of expropriation leads to under-investment; (ii) The optimal level of FDI decreases as the risk of expropriation rises; and (iii) Under certain...

This paper analyzes the economic determinants of developing country creditworthiness indicators for over 60 developing countries for the period from 1980 to 1993. Our results indicate that economic fundamentals--the ratio of non-gold foreign exchange reserves to imports, the ratio of the current...

This paper considers spatial linkages of bilateral trade, financial correlation, and bilateral distance to study the macroeconomic determinants of sovereign risk for frontier markets. Furthermore, to evaluate the extent to which countries' economic and geographical relations affect their credit...

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...