We show that sovereign debt is unsustainable if debt contracts are not supported by direct sanctions and default carries only a ban from ever borrowing in financial markets even in the presence of uninsurable risks and time-varying interest rate. This extension of Bulow and Rogoff, 1989 requires...

This paper surveys the literature on sovereign debt from the perspective of understanding how sovereign debt differs from privately issue debt, and why sovereign debt is deemed safe in some countries but risky in others. The answers relate to the unique power of the sovereign. One the one hand,...

Since February 2003 a number of debtor countries have issued bonds with collective action clauses (CACs) under New York law - a development welcomed by the official sector as tangible progress towards more orderly crisis resolution. Not all of these countries, however, have opted for the same...

Frequently, parties make sequential decisions regarding investments for which the probability of success or failure is dependent upon the amount of total investment. This paper reports a series of experiments involving a costly investment game which is derived from the catalytic finance model of...

This paper develops a micro-founded global game model of debt crises. I use this model to study which policies can help to prevent expectations-driven crises and how the desirability of such policies depends on market participants' expectations and the presence of economic policy uncertainty. I...

A common view of sovereign debt markets is that they are prone to multiple equilibria. We show that such multiplicity does not exist in the infinite-horizon model of Eaton and Gersovitz (1981), a widely adopted benchmark for analyses of these markets. When the value from government default is...