Quantitative models of sovereign debt predict that countries should default during deep recessions. However, empirical research on sovereign debt has found a surprisingly large share of "good times" defaults (i.e., defaults that happen when GDP is above trend). Existing evidence also indicates...

The 2015 Addis Ababa Action Agenda recognized the need for policies aimed at maintaining longterm debt sustainability. This paper describes a set of commonly used definitions of debt sustainability and shows that none of them focuses on long-term debt sustainability. It then discusses concept...

This paper describes and quantifies fiscal risk in advanced and developing economies. Forecast errors in GDP growth explain nearly half of fiscal risk in advanced economies. However, errors in growth forecasts are less important in explaining fiscal risk in low- and middle-income countries. Most...

This paper builds a dataset on bank ownership that covers more than 6,500 banks in 181 countries (59 low-income economies, 72 middle-income economies, and 50 high-income economies) over 1995-2020. I show that until 2010, there was a reduction in state-ownership of banks and an increase foreign...