State-contingent government debt has been proposed as a way to reduce costly debt crisis. However, markets for this type of debt remain very limited, for reasons that are not yet fully understood. This paper describes a new database covering state-contingent government debt issued between 1863...

Do emerging markets need to sacrifice economic sovereignty in order to borrow more cheaply on the international capital markets? To explore this, we exploit a natural experiment following the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 when four Balkan states - Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia - received full...

This paper presents four blue-sky ideas for lowering the cost of the Government of Canada's debt without increasing the debt's risk profile. We argue that each idea would improve the secondary-market liquidity of government debt, thereby increasing the demand for government bonds and thus...

The financial performance of governments in issuing debt is an open empirical question. We develop performance measures for the decisions debt management offices (DMOs) face: The amount to issue is largely exogenous to them, but they determine its distribution across issue dates (timing) and the...

Alexander Hamilton proposed a debt conversion plan for the United States in 1790 that allowed different creditors to choose from a list of different (reduced) repayment options. This plan was not, however, adopted by Congress, which instead opted for a one-size fits all scheme. Modern economic...

The paper proposes an operational definition of safe public debt levels and discusses various concrete approaches to calculate them. A public debt level is considered safe if it is associated with a low probability of reaching levels likely to generate significant economic costs within a given...