The Costs of Sovereign Default: Evidence from Argentina

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Hebert, Benjamin; Schreger, Jesse
• 署名单位: Stanford University; Columbia University; National Bureau of Economic Research
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0002-8282
• DOI: 10.1257/aer.20151667
• 发表日期: 2017
• 页码: 3119-3145
• 关键词: business cycles; monetary-policy; interest-rates; Credit risk; debt; MARKET; crises; economies; countries; prices

摘要

A fundamental question in international macroeconomics is why governments repay their debt to foreign creditors, given the limited recourse available to those creditors. The seminal paper of Eaton and Gersovitz (1981) argues that reputation concerns are sufficient to ensure that sovereigns repay their debt. In a famous critique, Bulow and Rogoff (1989a) demonstrate that reputation alone cannot sustain sovereign borrowing in equilibrium, without some other type of default cost or punishment. The size and features of this cost also play a key role in quantitative models of sovereign debt, beginning with Aguiar and Gopinath (2006) and Arellano (2008). Numerous empirical papers have been written trying to find the source and measure the size of these costs. The fundamental identification challenge is that governments usually default in response to deteriorating economic conditions, which makes it hard to determine if the default itself caused further harm to the economy.