Self-Fulfilling Debt Crises, Revisited: The Art of the Desperate Deal

Mark Aguiar, Satyajit Chatterjee (), Harold Cole and Zachary Stangebye ()

No 17-7, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Abstract: We revisit self-fulfilling rollover crises by introducing an alternative equilibrium selection that involves bond auctions at depressed but strictly positive equilibrium prices, a scenario in line with observed sovereign debt crises. We refer to these auctions as ?desperate deals?, the defining feature of which is a price schedule that makes the government indifferent to default or repayment. The government randomizes at the time of repayment, which we show can be implemented in pure strategies by introducing stochastic political payoffs or external bailouts. Quantitatively, auctions at fire-sale prices are crucial for generating realistic spread volatility.

Keywords: Debt; Crises; Bonds; Bond Auctions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 61 pages
Date: 2017-03-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/asset ... ers/2017/wp17-07.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedpwp:17-7

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Beth Paul ().