This paper investigates the transmission of uncertainty about the state of government finances on economic activity. I first employ a data-rich approach to extract a novel proxy that captures uncertainty surrounding the public finances of the Spanish economy, to which I refer as sovereign...

Contingent sovereign debt can create important welfare gains. Nonetheless, there is almost no issuance today. Using hand-collected archival data, we examine the first known case of large-scale use of state-contingent sovereign debt in history. Philip II of Spain entered into hundreds of...

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...

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 à la Eaton and Gersovitz (1981). We show that for the commonly used threshold state-contingent bond...

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?