The stock of sovereign debt is typically measured at face value. Defined as the undiscounted sum of future principal repayments, face values are misleading when debts are issued with different contractual forms or maturities. In this paper, we construct alternative measures of the stock of...

Why would a sovereign government, immune from bankruptcy procedures and with few assets that could be seized in the event of a default, ever repay foreign creditors? And, correspondingly, why do foreign creditors lend to sovereigns? This paper finds general conditions under which, even in the...

What determines the ability of governments from developing countries to access international credit markets? We examine this question using detailed data on sovereign bond issuances and public syndicated bank loans between 1980 and 2000. A key finding of this paper is that the probability of...