Extracting Default Probabilities from Sovereign Bonds

Default Probabilities on European Sovereign Debt: Market-based Estimates

This paper attempts to extract real-time market-based estimates of the default probabilities on Government debt for a selection of European countries, using a technique applied by Bierman and Hass (1979) and Fons (1987) in the corporate debt market. The technique involves solving the debt pricing equation for the martingale probabilities which under the no-arbitrage assumption equate the price ...

Predicting Sovereign Default

With the financial crises ongoing in Greece and Venezuela, sovereign debt crises have become more and more prominent in the public eye. Thus, it has become important to be able to predict when nations will enter such debt crises. We collected publicly available data in order to train models to predict, given a nation’s economic status in one year, whether they would be in a debt crisis the next...

Optimal sovereign default

When is it optimal for a government to default on its legal repayment obligations? We answer this question for a small open economy with domestic production risk in which contracting frictions make it optimal for the government to finance itself by issuing non-contingent debt. We show that Ramsey optimal policies occasionally deviate from the legal repayment obligation and repay debt only parti...

Sovereign default: which shocks matter?

This paper analyses a small open economy that wants to borrow from abroad, cannot commit to repay debt but faces costs if it decides to default. The model generates analytical expressions for the impact of shocks on the incentive compatible level of debt. Debt reduction generated by severe output shocks is no more than a couple of percentage points. In contrast, shocks to world interest rates c...

The Costs of Sovereign Default: Evidence from Argentina, Online Appendix