We review the state of the sovereign debt literature and point out that the canonical model of sovereign debt cannot be easily reconciled with several facts about sovereign debt pricing and servicing. We identify and classify twenty puzzles. Some are well known and documented, others are less so...

State-contingent government debt has been proposed as a way to reduce costly debt crisis. However, markets for this type of debt remain very limited, for reasons that are not yet fully understood. This paper describes a new database covering state-contingent government debt issued between 1863...

Three major global crises since 2008 have pushed up public and external debt ratios and associated risks across much of Asia and the Pacific. This is confirmed by debt ratio projections and evidence of widening pockets of vulnerability picked up by regional heat maps in this paper. By and large,...