This is the graduation speech I gave on receiving an honorary doctorate at the University of Athens Economics and Business School. I talk about my Greek family, about how I got interested in economics, and then how in the 1990s I came to think about default, collateral, and leverage as the...

This paper examines key determinants of the distance between the sovereign's credit rating and the ratings of sub-sovereign foreign currency bonds, such as bond issuers' type, debt characteristics, and global and country's economic conditions. Using a comprehensive international bond-level...

Until recently, there have been few efforts to systematically measure and aggregate the nominal value of the different types of sovereign government debt in default. To help fill this gap, the Bank of Canada's Credit Rating Assessment Group (CRAG) has developed a comprehensive database of...

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,...

This paper investigates the risk implications of securitizing the Eurozone sovereign debt as collateralised debt obligations (CDO). The proposal of creating asset-backed securities underpinned by Eurozone sovereign bonds has gained traction since the Eurozone Sovereign Debt Crisis of 2009-2012,...

In this note we provide new evidence regarding the size and dynamics of the credit risk premium on Irish Sovereign bonds during the 1980s and early 1990s when fiscal conditions were similar to those currently being experienced. Our analysis is not confounded by the effects of exchange rate risk...

In recent years debt in Colorado has increased at an unsustainable rate. A debt brake is simulated for the Colorado economy. When the debt brake is triggered the spending cap imposed by the Tabor Amendment is reduced, with surplus revenue earmarked for debt reduction. The simulation analysis...

Crises on external sovereign debt are typically defined as defaults. Such a definition accurately captures debt-servicing difficulties in the 1980s, a period of numerous defaults on bank loans. However, defining defaults as debt crises is problematic for the 1990s, when sovereign bond markets...

We employ a machine learning approach to build a European sovereign risk stratification using macroeconomic fundamentals and contagion measures, proxied by copula-based credit default swap (CDS) dependencies over the period 2008-2017, for France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and...