Leading into a debt crisis, interest rate spreads on sovereign debt rise before the economy experiences a decline in productivity, suggesting that news about future economic developments may play an important role in these episodes. In a VAR estimation, a news shock has a larger contemporaneous...

"We study an economy in which policymakers of different types (patient vs. impatient) alternate in power. Our framework builds on the model used in recent quantitative studies of sovereign default. We show that a default episode may be triggered by a change in the type in office, from a patient...