This paper was presented at the panel session entitled “Risk managers on default probability for prime sovereigns”, held during the seminar on sovereign risk hosted by the BIS in January 2013.Full publication: "http://ssrn.com/abstract=2420000" Sovereign Risk: A World Without Risk-Free Assets?

We analyze how concerns for model misspecification on the part of international lenders affect the desirability of issuing state-contingent debt instruments in a standard sovereign default model a la Eaton and Gersovitz (1981). We show that for the commonly used threshold state-contingent bond...