We provide benchmarks to evaluate what is an optimal foreign debt and a maximal foreign debt (debt-max), when risk is explicitly considered. When the actual debt exceeds debt-max, then the economy will default when a bad shock occurs. This paper is an application of the stochastic optimal...

centuries, defaulting governments were immune from legal action by foreign creditors. This paper shows that this is no longer the case. Building a dataset covering four decades, we find that creditor lawsuits have become an increasingly common feature of sovereign debt markets. The legal...

How will sovereign debt markets evolve in the 21st century? We survey how the literature has responded to the eurozone debt crisis, placing "lessons learned" in historical perspective. The crisis featured: (i) the return of debt problems to advanced economies; (ii) a bank-sovereign "doom-loop"...

We use insights from the literature on currency crises to offer an analytical treatment of the crisis in the market for Greek government bonds. We argue that the crisis itself and its escalating nature are very likely to be the result of: (a) steady deterioration of Greek macroeconomic...

We empirically assess the interlinkages between sovereign risk, measured in terms of CDS spreads, and exchange rates for a sample of emerging markets. Our period of analysis includes periods of severe stress, such as the Global Financial Crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukrainian War. Using...

When firms borrow in foreign currency but collect revenues in local currency, exchange rate changes can affect their ability to repay their debt. Using loan-level data from U.S. banks' regulatory filings, this paper studies the effect of exchange rate changes on firms’ loan payments. A 10...

Theory suggests that corporate and sovereign bonds are fundamentally different, also because sovereign debt has no bankruptcy mechanism and is hard to enforce. We show empirically that the two assets are more similar than you think, at least when it comes to high-yield bonds over the past 20...

This paper shows that monetary policy and prudential policies interact. U.S. banks issue more commercial and industrial loans to emerging market borrowers when U.S. monetary policy eases. The effect is less pronounced for banks that are more constrained through the U.S. bank stress tests,...

A main puzzle in the sovereign debt literature is that defaults have only minor effects on subsequent borrowing costs and access to credit. This paper comes to a different conclusion. We construct the first complete database of investor losses ("haircuts") in all restructurings with foreign...