We show that sovereign debt is unsustainable if debt contracts are not supported by direct sanctions and default carries only a ban from ever borrowing in financial markets even in the presence of uninsurable risks and time-varying interest rate. This extension of Bulow and Rogoff, 1989 requires...

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...

A common view of sovereign debt markets is that they are prone to multiple equilibria. We show that such multiplicity does not exist in the infinite-horizon model of Eaton and Gersovitz (1981), a widely adopted benchmark for analyses of these markets. When the value from government default is...

Democracies around the world are making promises to the old at the expense of future generations. I interpret this as reflecting low altruism - a discount rate on children's utility greater than the world interest rate - and I examine the implications in a small open economy with overlapping...

Policy prescriptions for managing natural resource windfalls are based on the permanent income hypothesis: none of the windfall is invested at home and saving in an intergenerational SWF is dictated by smoothing consumption across different generations. Furthermore, with Dutch disease effects...

This chapter adopts the working assumption that it is conceivable that at some time in the future it would be in the interest of the United States to restructure its sovereign debt (i.e., to reduce the principal amount). It addresses in particular U.S. Treasury Securities. The chapter first...

This study investigates the reaction of stock prices to sovereign debt restructurings and credit rating reviews in six frontier stock markets. The study uses the event study methodology corrected for the impact of thin trading to investigate stock market reaction to sovereign debt restructurings...

This paper calls attention to the role of the secondary market in shortening the duration of sovereign debt renegotiation. Consider a dynamic bargaining game with incomplete information between a government and creditors. The creditors' reservation is private information, and the government...

This article explores the challenges posed by the rising US national debt and government budget deficits. Using a combination of literature review and statistical analysis, the article examines the factors contributing to the national debt and the potential consequences of unsustainable...

This paper estimates a VAR model to assess the sensitivity of U.S. Treasury yields to supply shocks that may be triggered by massive sell-offs of Treasury securities by foreign holders. The results suggest that the Treasury yield was not very susceptible to changes in supply and that if China,...