Linkages across sovereign debt markets

Cristina Arellano and Yan Bai

No 491, Staff Report from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Abstract: We develop a multicountry model in which default in one country triggers default in other countries. Countries are linked to one another by borrowing from and renegotiating with common lenders with concave payoffs. A foreign default increases incentives to default at home because it makes new borrowing more expensive and defaulting less costly. Foreign defaults tighten home bond prices because they lower lenders' payoffs. Foreign defaults make home default less costly by lowering future recoveries, because countries can extract more surplus if they renegotiate simultaneously. In our model, the home country may default only because the foreign country is defaulting. This dependency arises during fundamental foreign defaults, where the foreign country defaults because of high debt and low income, and also during self-fulfilling defaults, where both countries default only because the other is defaulting. The simultaneity in defaults induces a correlation in interest rate spreads across countries. The model can rationalize some of the recent economic events in Europe.

Keywords: Debt; Europe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-eec, nep-ifn and nep-opm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr491.pdf
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=5166 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Linkages across Sovereign Debt Markets (2013)
Working Paper: Linkages across sovereign debt markets (2012)
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:fedmsr:491

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Report from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kate Hansel ().