Indexed Sovereign Debt: a Survey and a Framework of Analysis

Guido Sandleris and Filippo Taddei

No 66, Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto

Abstract: A small number of countries have issued real indexed sovereign debt in recent year. This type of contracts could improve risk sharing between debtor countries and international creditors and diminish the probability of occurrence of debt crises. However, it is not clear the magnitude of these effects in terms of welfare. Furthermore, it has not been analyzed whether the design of the existing contracts was optimal. This paper addresses these issues. We characterize the optimal features of indexed debt contracts in a dynamic stochastic equilibrium framework with incomplete markets and compare them to existing ones. Finally, we obtain a quantitative approximation of the welfare effects of indexation. We find that the optimal contract improves welfare and features payments increasing in the state of the economy. Existing real indexed contracts usually entail payments increasing in the state of the economy. However, they also feature threshold levels of the chosen real variable that trigger payments. We argue that the latter are usually suboptimal. Calibrating our model to Argentina’s economy we find that the welfare gains from introducing indexed debt are equivalent to an increase of between 0.6% and 2%.

Keywords: GDP-indexed Debt; Country Portfolio; Contingent Debt. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F34 F37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba and nep-dge
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.carloalberto.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/no.66.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:cca:wpaper:66

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giovanni Bert ().