The COVID-19 epidemic in emerging markets risks a combined health, economic, and debt crisis. We integrate a standard epidemiology model into a sovereign default model and study how default risk impacts the ability of these countries to respond to the epidemic. Lockdown policies are useful for...

The COVID-19 epidemic in emerging markets risks a combined health, economic, and debt crisis. We integrate a standard epidemiology model into a sovereign default model and study how default risk impacts the ability of these countries to respond to the epidemic. Lockdown policies are useful for...

Economic sanctions, and the suspension of budget support in particular, are supposed to pressure target governments to comply with donors' demands by putting spending commitments at risk. We argue that this is too simplistic since governments have more fiscal levers at their disposal. The case...