Why do countries tend to repay their domestic and external debt, even though the legal enforcement of the sovereign debt contract is limited? Contrary to conventional wisdom, we argue that temporary market exclusion after default is costly. When the domestic financial market is characterized by...

We develop a dynamic recursive model where political and economic decisions interact, to study how excessive debt-GDP ratios affect political sustainability of prudent fiscal policies. Rent seeking groups make political decisions - to cooperate (or not) - on the allocation of fiscal budgets...

Sovereign defaults are bad news for investors and debtor countries, in particular if a default becomes messy and protracted. Why are some debt crises resolved quickly, in a matter of months, while others take many years to settle? This paper studies the duration of sovereign debt crises based on...

We develop a pricing model for sovereign contingent convertible bonds (S-CoCo) with payment standstills triggered by a sovereign's credit default swap CDS spread. One innovation is the modeling of CDS spread regime switching which is prevalent during crises. Regime switching is modeled as a...

This paper uses a risk-management approach to re-profile the sovereign debt of countries facing debt crises. Using scenario analysis we develop a risk measure of the sovereign's debt -- Conditional Debt-at-Risk -- and an optimization model is used to trace risk profiles that tradeoff expected...

This paper studies the relationship between sovereign debt default and sovereign credit risk by taking into account the depth of a debt restructuring and by distinguishing between commercial and official debt. We take different proxies for credit risk measures, such as rating agencies and...

International financial institutions (IFIs) generally enjoy preferred creditors treatment (PCT). Although PCT rarely appears in legal contracts, when sovereigns restructure bilateral or commercial debts, they normally pay IFIs in full. This paper presents a model where a creditor, such as an...

We study a model of equilibrium sovereign default in which the government issues cocos (contingent convertible bonds) that stipulate a suspension of debt payments when the government faces liquidity shocks in the form of an increase of the bondholders' risk aversion. We find that in spite of...

The COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique setting in which to evaluate the importance of a country's fiscal capacity in explaining the relation between economic growth shocks and sovereign default risk. For a sample of 30 developed countries, we find a positive and significant sensitivity of...