A key precursor of twentieth-century financial crises in emerging and advanced economies alike was the rapid buildup of leverage. Those emerging economies that avoided leverage booms during the 2000s also were most likely to avoid the worst effects of the twenty-first century’s first global...

I construct a model of a small open economy in which government spending is necessary to mitigate transaction cost. This provides a simple raison d’etre for a government and generates features many sovereign default models do not have: taxes and government spending. Even though the government...

This paper investigates the impact of sovereign defaults on the ability of the corporate sector in emerging nations to finance itself abroad. The hypothesis here is that defaults have a negative spillover effect on the private sector through credit rationing. We explore a novel dataset covering...

Emerging countries that have defaulted on their debt repayment obligations in the past are more likely to default again in the future than are non-defaulters even with the same debt-to-GDP ratio. This paper explains this stylized fact within a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework by...

In the past, foreign borrowing by developing countries was comprised almost entirely of government borrowing. However, private firms and individuals in developing countries now borrow substantially from foreign lenders. It is often asserted that this surge in private sector borrowing generates...

This paper develops an endogenous default risk model for small open economies that interact with risk averse international investors whose preferences exhibit decreasing absolute risk aversion (DARA). By incorporating risk averse investors who trade with an emerging economy, the present model...

This paper analyzes the impact of the government debt-to-GDP ratio on the correlation of the fiscal balance and the current account. Above a government debt-to-GDP ratio of 90 percent the correlation of the two balances decreases by 0.16 in a sample of 12 euro area countries and by 0.17 for...

Empirical evidence shows that sovereign defaults are associated with significant downturns in economic activity in defaulting countries. However, the existing literature on sovereign debt and default mainly analyzes endowment economies and, therefore, does not address the relationship between...

In the past, foreign borrowing by developing countries was comprised almost entirely of government borrowing. Recently, private firms and individuals in developing countries borrow substantially from foreign lenders. It is not clear whether the observed increase in private sector borrowing leads...

We develop a dynamic model of sovereign default and renegotiation to study how expectations of default and debt restructuring in the near future affect the ex ante maturity structure of sovereign debts. This paper argues that the average maturity is shorter when a country is approaching...