Reputation and Sovereign Default

Manuel Amador and Christopher Phelan

No 24682, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper presents a continuous-time model of sovereign debt. In it, a relatively impatient sovereign government's hidden type switches back and forth between a commitment type, which cannot default, and an optimizing type, which can default at any time, and assume outside lenders have particular beliefs regarding how a commitment type should borrow for any given level of debt and bond price. If these beliefs satisfy reasonable assumptions, in any Markov equilibrium, the optimizing type mimics the commitment type when borrowing, revealing its type only by defaulting on its debt at random times. Further, in such Markov equilibria (the solution to a simple pair of ordinary differential equations), there are positive gross issuances at all dates, constant net imports as long as there is a positive equilibrium probability that the government is the optimizing type, and net debt repayment only by the commitment type. For countries that have recently defaulted, the interest rate the country pays on its debt is a decreasing function of the amount of time since its last default, and its total debt is an increasing function of the amount of time since its last default. For countries that have not recently defaulted, interest rates are constant.

JEL-codes: F3 F34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-gth and nep-opm
Note: EFG IFM
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published as Manuel Amador & Christopher Phelan, 2021. "Reputation and Sovereign Default," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 89(4), pages 1979-2010, July.

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Related works:
Working Paper: Reputation and Sovereign Default (2018)
Working Paper: Reputation and Sovereign Default (2017)
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