A large body of the empirical literature shows that high turnover rates/length of tenure of policymakers and the degree of conflict within a country affects sovereign spreads, debt and default rates. We help to rationalize such claims by including these political features in a dynamic stochastic...

This paper builds a unified model of sovereign debt, default risk, and news shocks. News shocks improve the quantitative performance of the sovereign default model in a number of empirically-relevant dimensions. First, with news shocks, not all defaults occur during downturns. Second, the news...