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...

World capital markets have experienced large-scale sovereign defaults on a number of occasions, the most recent being Argentina's default in 2002. In this paper, we develop a quantitative model of debt and default in a small open economy. We use this model to match four empirical regularities...

When is it optimal for a government to default on its legal repayment oblig- ations? We answer this question for a small open economy with domestic production risk in which the government optimally finances itself by issuing non-contingent debt. We show that Ramsey optimal policies occasionally...

When is it optimal for a government to default on its legal repayment obligations? We answer this question for a small open economy with domestic production risk in which contracting frictions make it optimal for the government to finance itself by issuing non-contingent debt. We show that...

When is it optimal for a government to default on its legal repayment obligations? We answer this question for a small open economy with domestic production risk in which contracting frictions make it optimal for the government to finance itself by issuing non-contingent debt. We show that...

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...

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 current crisis and discussions, in the euro area in particular, show that sovereign debt crises/defaults are no longer restricted to developing economies. After crises in many Latin American countries, the literature on quantitative dynamic macro-models of sovereign default has been...

This paper develops a quantitative general equilibrium model of sovereign default with heterogeneous agents to account for spillover of default risk across countries. Borrowers (sovereign governments) and foreign lenders (investors) in the model face financial frictions, which endogenously...

I introduce endogenous capital accumulation into an otherwise standard quantitative sovereign default model in the tradition of Eaton and Gersovitz (1981), and find that conditional on a level of debt, default incentives are U shaped in the capital stock: the economy with too small or too large...