This article explores the challenges posed by the rising US national debt and government budget deficits. Using a combination of literature review and statistical analysis, the article examines the factors contributing to the national debt and the potential consequences of unsustainable...

This paper discusses some of the legal aspects of Collective Action Clauses (CACs) in the context of the Eurozone and then approaches the broader economic issue of why it may be useful to have more efficient CACs, such as single-limb CACs, and when and in what circumstances it may be appropriate...

We review the state of the sovereign debt literature and point out that the canonical model of sovereign debt cannot be easily reconciled with several facts about sovereign debt pricing and servicing. We identify and classify twenty puzzles. Some are well known and documented, others are less so...

We review the state of the sovereign debt literature and point out that the canonical model of sovereign debt cannot be easily reconciled with several facts about sovereign debt pricing and servicing. We identify and classify twenty puzzles. Some are well known and documented, others are less so...

This paper presents a theory of sovereign borrowing and lending when there is no court to enforce repayment obligations. Specifically, I extend the costly state verification approach in financial contracting to include an ex-post repayment decision in which the borrower repays creditors to avoid...

• The IMF staff's 2013 proposal to reprofile (i.e., stretch out for a short period without haircutting principal or interest) the maturing debt of a country that has lost market access is a sensible policy in cases where the IMF is uncertain whether the country's debt stock is sustainable.•...

This paper develops a non-stochastic sovereign-debt dynamic model, with increasing cost of capital. It finds that there are parameters for which there is a stable fixed borrowing level, and there are parameters for which the model depicts the case of serial defaulters. Levels of debt that tend...

One of the main conclusions of Reinhart and Rogoff's study of sovereign debt crises, highlighted in its title This Time is Different, is that markets for sovereign debt are prone to manic mood swings. When things go well for an extended period, lenders tend to underestimate risks of crisis. They...

We present a theory of determinants of sovereign debt stability on foreign and domestic markets. Besides the two traditional factors - debt size and output contractions, we highlight the role of the third factor: distortionary tax, which hinders the government’s ability to freely raise...

This paper explores how selective default expectations affect the pricing of sovereign bonds in a historical laboratory: the German default of the 1930s. We analyze yield differentials between identical government bonds traded across various creditor countries before and after bond market...