This article discusses the economics of sovereign defaults, summarizing lessons from existing work on this issue. In particular, the article describes the costs associated with a sovereign default episode, identifies circumstances that are likely to lead to a default, and discusses how...

The article studies the role of the assumption that countries can be punished with financial exclusion after a sovereign default. It describes the business cycle properties of a sovereign default model with the exclusion punishment and compares them with those of the same model without the...

Two striking facts about international capital flows in emerging economies motivate this paper: (1) Governments hold large amounts of international reserves, for which they obtain a return lower than their borrowing cost. (2) Purchases of domestic assets by nonresidents and purchases of foreign...

This paper provides a theoretical framework to quantitatively investigate the optimal accumulation of international reserves to hedge against rollover risk. We study a dynamic model of endogenous default in which the government faces a tradeoff between the insurance benefits of reserves with the...

We extend the model used in recent quantitative studies of sovereign default, allowing policymakers of different types to alternate in power. We show that a default episode may be triggered by a change in the type of policymaker in office, and that such a default is likely to occur only if there...

A model of mortgage defaults is built into the standard incomplete markets model. Households face income and house-price shocks and purchase houses using long-term mortgages. Interest rates on mortgages are determined in equilibrium according to the risk of default. The model accounts for the...

We present a model in which households facing income and housing-price shocks use long-term mortgages to purchase houses. Interest rates on mortgages reflect the risk of default. The model accounts for observed patterns of housing consumption, mortgage borrowing, and defaults. We use the model...

We measure the effects of debt dilution on sovereign default risk and study debt covenants that could mitigate these effects. We calibrate a baseline model with endogenous debt duration and default risk (in which debt can be diluted) using data from Spain. We find that debt dilution accounts for...

We present a model in which households facing income and housing-price shocks use long-term mortgages to purchase houses. Interest rates on mortgages reflect the risk of default. The model accounts for observed patterns of housing consumption, mortgage borrowing, and defaults. We use the model...

We use a sovereign default model to study the effects of introducing limits to the decision-making capabilities of governments-fiscal rules. We show that optimal limits to the debt level vary greatly across parameterizations of the model that deliver different levels of debt tolerance. In...