The Dynamics of Sovereign Default Risk and Political Turnover

This paper develops a stochastic dynamic politico-economic model of sovereign debt to analyze the interaction of sovereign default risk and political turnover. Two parties differ in their preferred size of public spending which is financed by taxes and external debt. Electoral outcomes are characterized by tradeoffs between the economic benefits from the incumbent's policies against idiosyncratic ideological aspects. Quantitative simulations replicate the typical empirical facts of emerging markets. Endogenous political turnovers increase the parties' discrepancies between debt and default policies. Debt crises are associated with adverse economic shocks and trigger political turnovers. Political turnovers generate defaults even without negative shocks.