The wave of sovereign defaults in the early 1980s and the string of debt crises in the decades that followed have fostered proposals involving policy interventions in sovereign debt restructurings. A key question about these proposals that has proved hard to handle is how they in influence the...

This paper addresses the following questions. Is there evidence of financial contagion in the Eurozone? To what extent a country's vulnerability to contagion depends on "fundamentals" as opposed the government's "credibility"? We look at the empirical evidence on European sovereigns CDS spreads...

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...

Sovereign debt crises involve debt restructurings characterized by a mix of face-value haircuts and maturity extensions. The prevalence of maturity extensions has been hard to reconcile with economic theory. We develop a model of endogenous debt restructuring that captures key facts of sovereign...

How will sovereign debt markets evolve in the 21st century? We survey how the literature has responded to the eurozone debt crisis, placing "lessons learned" in historical perspective. The crisis featured: (i) the return of debt problems to advanced economies; (ii) a bank-sovereign "doom-loop"...

This paper surveys recent economic and legal literature on sovereign debt in light of the COVID-19 shock. Most of the core theoretical contributions we review across the two disciplines hinge on immunity, and the sovereign borrower's consequent inability to commit to repay foreign creditors, as...

In this paper we study the determinants of sovereign debt credit ratings using rating notations from the three main international rating agencies, for the period 1995-2005. We employ panel estimation and random effects ordered probit approaches to assess the explanatory power of several...

At the 25th anniversary of the Maastricht Treaty, this paper reviews the merits of introducing a safe sovereign asset for the eurozone. The triple euro area crisis showed the costly consequences of ignoring the "safety trilemma". Keeping a national safe sovereign asset (the German bund) as the...

This paper investigates the major drivers of the public debt growth in 184 countries. Our analysis consists in a cross-country survey, which is conducted on the basis of the improved compilation of datasets on the central government debt for 2013. In order to differentiate between...

Until recently, few efforts have been made to systematically measure and aggregate the nominal value of the different types of sovereign government debt in default. To help fill this gap, the Bank of Canada (BoC) developed a comprehensive database of sovereign defaults that is posted on its...