This paper studies the incentives for fiscal adjustment for a debtor government under the risk of defaulting on its external debt. An externality arises from the bargaining process that follows default: higher tax revenues levied by the debtor lead to higher repayment to the creditor, and thus...

This paper studies fiscal policy in a model of sovereign debt and default. A time-inconsistency problem arises: since the price of past debt cannot be affected by current fiscal policy and governments cannot credibly commit to a certain path of tax rates, debtor countries choose suboptimally low...

This paper studies the incentives for fiscal adjustment for a debtor government under the risk of defaulting on its external debt. An externality arises from the bargaining process that follows default: higher tax revenues levied by the debtor lead to higher repayment to the creditor, and thus...