There has emerged in the Western economies a strong nexus between the credit risks of fi nancial sectors and their sovereigns. We argue that this phenomenon can be understood in the context of two debt overhang problems: one affecting the fi nancial sector due to its under-capitalisation following the crisis of 2007-08; the second, affecting the non-fi nancial sector, whose incentives are crowd...

outbreak of 2009 european sovereign debt (leverage) crisis has been one of the most crucial economic events of recent years. accordingly, researchers devoted a great deal of efforts to elucidate origins and consequences of this crisis, particularly focusing on its potential effect on international trade flows. yet in the literature, there have been rare studies on exploring the effects of sover...

We study a model of sovereign debt crisis that combines problems of creditor coordination and debtor moral hazard. Solving the sovereign debtor’s incentives leads to excessive ‘rollover failure’ by creditors when sovereign default occurs. We discuss how the incidence of crises might be reduced by international sovereign bankruptcy procedures and relate this to the current debate on revising int...

The new markets for credit derivatives allow for buying protection on sovereign debt. This paper considers the implications for sovereign debt crises. We show that the availability of credit protection lowers ex-ante debtor moral hazard by allowing a bondholder to improve his bargaining position in negotiations with the sovereign, thus forcing the sovereign to internalize more of the costs of a...

We develop methods for Bayesian model averaging (BMA) or selection (BMS) in Panel Vector Autoregressions (PVARs). Our approach allows us to select between or average over all possible combinations of restricted PVARs where the restrictions involve interdependencies between and heterogeneities across cross-sectional units. The resulting BMA framework can find a parsimonious PVAR specification, t...

This paper draws on network theory to investigate European banks’ sovereign debt exposures. Banks’ holdings of sovereign debt build a network of financial linkages with European countries that exhibits a long-tail distribution of node degrees. A highly connected network core of 15 banks is identified. These banks accounted for the majority of sovereign debt investments between December 2010 and...

Abstract: The European sovereign-debt crisis began in Greece when the government announced in December, 2009, that its debt reached 121% of GDP (or 300 billion euros) and its 2009 budget deficit was 12.7% of GDP, four times the level allowed by the Maastricht Treaty. The Greek crisis soon spread to other Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) countries, notably Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy. Us...

Following the 2008 global financial crisis, years of low interest rates provided a rare opportunity for many developing nations to borrow in international markets—whether issuing bonds their own currencies, securing loans from private-sector banks and commodity traders, or borrowing China, which emerged as dominant official creditor. Developing countries’ overall external debt rose record level...

This paper provides, and empirically estimates, a structural model of sovereign default risk on external debt. The sovereign endogenously determines its level of foreign debt and default policy. Consistent with default crisis episodes, the sovereign and its lenders bargain at default over a reduction of the debt service. The potential for debt restructuring o¤ers the sovereign greater incentive...

The global financial crisis and the policy response to it have placed a sharp spotlight on the issue of implicit guarantees for bank debt. This report discusses the incidence of implicit government guarantees for bank debt, their determinants, and estimates of their value. It shows i) that the extent of implicit guarantees differs from one banking sector to another and, within a given banking s...