Unresolved sovereign debt problems are hurting debtor nations, their citizens and their creditors, and also can pose serious systemic threats to the international financial system. The existing contractual restructuring approach is insufficient to make sovereign debt sustainable. Although a more...

In an influential paper, Bulow and Rogoff (1989) prove that in a competitive financial market, the threat of credit exclusion alone cannot sustain repayment of sovereign debt, as the defaulting government can still enter cash-in-advance insurance contracts. However, their result relies on an...

This paper was presented at the panel session entitled “Risk managers on default probability for prime sovereigns”, held during the seminar on sovereign risk hosted by the BIS in January 2013.Full publication: "http://ssrn.com/abstract=2420000" Sovereign Risk: A World Without Risk-Free Assets?