Why do countries tend to repay their domestic and external debt, even though the legal enforcement of the sovereign debt contract is limited? Contrary to conventional wisdom, we argue that temporary market exclusion after default is costly. When the domestic financial market is characterized by...

We study the joint behavior of external debt, international reserves, and the real interest rate based on a dynamic regime-switching small open economy model that incorporates the salient features of economic crises in emerging markets. Our model allows an assessment of the two well-known...

Sovereign state-contingent bonds, in particular growth-indexed bonds (GIBs), have rarely been issued in practice despite their theoretical benefits. This paper provides support for this apparent sovereign noncontingency puzzle by deriving the impact of GIBs on the upper tail of the distribution...

This chapter is on quantitative models of sovereign debt crises in emerging economies. We interpret debt crises broadly to cover all of the major problems a country can experience while trying to issue new debt, including default, sharp increases in the spread and failed auctions. We examine the...

How do financial markets respond to concerns over debt sustainability and the level of public debt in emerging markets? We introduce a measure of debt sustainability – the difference between the debt stabilizing primary balance and the primary balance – in an otherwise standard spread...

This paper provides a set of stylised facts on the mechanisms through which banking and sovereign distress feed into each other, using a large sample of emerging economies over three decades. We first define "twin crises" as events where banking crises and sovereign defaults combine, and further...

Remittances are transfers of money by foreign workers to their home countries. These remittance flows have been considered a very important source of finance for many developing countries accounting between 5-40% of the recipient country's GDP. This paper empirically examines whether remittance...

Debt in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) is at its highest level in half a century. In about nine out of 10 EMDEs, debt is higher now than it was in 2010 and, in half of the EMDEs, debt is more than 30 percentage points of gross domestic product higher. Historically, elevated...

Emerging countries that have defaulted on their debt repayment obligations in the past are more likely to default again in the future than are non-defaulters even with the same external debt-to-GDP ratio. These countries actually have repeated defaults or restructurings in short periods. This...