This article studies sovereign credit spreads using a contingent claims model and a balance sheet representation of the sovereign economy. Analytical formulae for domestic and external debt values as well as for the financial guarantee are derived in a framework where recovery rate is...

In the presence of recovery risk, the recovery rate is a random variable whose risk-neutral expectation can be inferred from the prices of defaultable instruments. I extract market-implied recovery rates from the term structures of credit default swap spreads for a sample of 497 United States...