The European sovereign debt crisis, started in the second half of 2011, has posed the problem for asset managers, trades and risk managers to assess sovereign default risk. In the reduced form framework, it is necessary to understand the interrelationship between creditworthiness of a sovereign,...

Expectations of risky bond payments are unobservable and recovery rates for sovereigns are hard to estimate because they have no contractual claims to defined assets and samples of defaults are limited. A geometric version of credit spread is used to derive expected payments, dependent on...

We provide a model able to compute a threshold level for the public debt/GDP ratio, such that a country can be rescued by an official lender (e.g. ESM or IMF). The critical level is defined as the maximum level of debt/GDP, such that it is still possible to put the debt/GDP ratio on a...