This paper deals with fiscal policy over the business cycle when international financial markets are imperfect. I document evidence that government expenditure tends to be more procyclical the higher is the borrowing cost for a sovereign. Decomposing government expenditure components shows that...

This paper studies the impact of the state-dependent risk of a government default on the correlation of the scal balance and current account. We use a small open economy model where nonlinear risk premia arise endogenously when the government operates close to its scal limit, i.e. the maximum...

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...

The wave of sovereign defaults in the early 1980s and the string of debt crises in the decades that followed have fostered proposals involving policy interventions in sovereign debt restructurings. A key question about these proposals that has proved hard to handle is how they in influence the...

This paper explores a natural connection between fiscal multipliers and foreign holdings of public debt. Although fiscal expansions can raise domestic economic activity through various channels, they can also have crowding-out effects if the resources used to acquire public debt reduce domestic...

Capital accumulation in Argentina was slow in the 1990s, despite high total factor productivity (TFP) growth and low international interest rates. A possible explanation for the "missing capital" is that foreign investors were reluctant to take advantage of the high returns to investment...

How costly are sovereign debt crises? In this paper we study output losses during sovereign default and debt renegotiation episodes since 1980. In contrast to previous work, we account for the severity of default and not only for its occurrence. Specifically, we distinguish between "hard" and...

We propose a "debt view" to explain the dominant international role of the dollar and provide broad empirical support for it. Within a simple capital structure model in which firms optimally choose the currency composition of their debt, we derive conditions under which all firms issue debt in a...

Sovereign debt crises involve debt restructurings characterized by a mix of face-value haircuts and maturity extensions. The prevalence of maturity extensions has been hard to reconcile with economic theory. We develop a model of endogenous debt restructuring that captures key facts of sovereign...

Fiscal policy is procyclical in developing countries. An ample literature has explained this fact and explored its consequences for aggregate cyclical fluctuations. Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) are an important source of finance for governments and therefore play a role in the execution...