The paper presents a new database on sovereign debt in the Americas, describing the sources used and briefly discussing several methodological issues. The paper also highlights major trends in level and composition of public debt in the Americas, discussing debt dollarization in detail.

Few would dispute that sovereign defaults entail significant economic costs, including, most notably, important output losses. However, most of the evidence supporting this conventional wisdom, based on annual observations, suffers from serious measurement and identification problems. To address...