During the recent European sovereign debt crisis, returns on EMU government bond portfolios experienced substantial volatility clustering, leptokurtosis and skewed returns, as well as correlation spikes. Asset managers invested in European government bonds had to derive new hedging strategies to deal with the changing return properties and the higher level of uncertainty. In this market environ...

a r t i c l e i n f o The paper examines the role of newswire messages during the European debt crisis. In particular, this study quantifies how this news metric, revealed by statements electronically recorded, as well as by newspaper articles, affects credit ratings. Through a sample of three European countries with sovereign debt problems and under strict austerity programmes, i.e., Greece, I...

Premiums on US sovereign CDS have risen to persistently elevated levels since the financial crisis. In this paper, we ask whether these premiums reflect the probability of a US fiscal default, namely a state in which budget balance can no longer be restored by further raising taxes or eroding the real value of debt by raising inflation. To that end, we develop an equilibrium macrofinance model ...

Sovereign default often affects country’s trade relations. The defaulter’s currency depreciates while trade volume falls drastically. To explain this connection, this study proposes a model to incorporate real depreciation along with sovereign bankruptcy. Defaulters must exchange more of their own goods for imports, which stimulates an adjustment to the equilibrium exchange rate. We demonstrate...

We examine whether Brazilian sovereign spreads of over 20 percent in 2002 could be due to contagion from Argentina or to domestic politics, or both. Treating unilateral debt restructuring as a policy variable gives rise to the possibility of self-fulfilling crisis, which can be triggered by contagion. We explore an alternative political-economy explanation of panic in financial markets inspired...

We model sovereign debt in the absence of a bankruptcy code. Threat of trade sanctions and seizure of exports by the lenders are the drivers of enforcement of sovereign debt contracts.The borrower takes these potential actions into account when choosing optimal voluntary default and debt capacity. We obtain a closedform solution for the sovereign yield spreads that depend on the costs of sancti...

An important inefficiency in sovereign debt markets is debt dilution, wherein sovereigns ignore the adverse impact of new debt on the value of existing debt and, consequently, borrow too much and default too frequently. A widely proposed remedy is the inclusion of seniority clause in sovereign debt contracts: Creditors who lent first have priority in any restructuring proceedings. We incorporat...

a r t i c l e i n f o Sovereign debt crises in emerging markets are usually associated with liquidity and banking crises. The conventional view is that the domestic turmoil is the consequence of foreign retaliation, although there is no clear empirical evidence on " classic " default penalties. This paper emphasizes, instead, a direct link between sovereign defaults and liquidity crises buildin...

This article develops a framework that combines the economics behind the structural modeling of sovereign credit risk, corporate capital structure, and the equilibrium modeling of international asset pricing. The default decisions of the sovereign and the firm are derived optimally and embedded in a two-country, two-good consumption-based asset-pricing model with a representative risk-averse ag...