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...

This paper focuses on emerging markets government bonds issued in local currency with different maturities. Foreign investors face interest rate, currency, and credit risks. We consider the entire term structure of carry trade returns and find that, while the default premium does not contribute...

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?

The main objective of this paper is to develop a practical approach to Argentina's sovereign risk management. Through Contingent Claim Analysis (CCA), Gape, Gray, Lim and Xiao (2008)[1] developed a sovereign risk framework whereby we can construct a marked to market sovereign balance sheet and...

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...

This paper proposes a new framework for the analysis of public sector debt sustainability. The framework uses concepts and methods from modern practice of contingent claims to develop a quantitative risk-based model of sovereign credit risk. The motivation in developing this framework is to...