A General Equilibrium Model Of Sovereign Default And Business Cycles PDF Download

This dissertation consists of three independent essays on sovereign default. In the first chapter, I develop a quantitative general equilibrium model of sovereign default to account for spillover of default risk across countries. When the collateral constraint for investors binds due to a decrease in the value of collateral, triggered by a high default risk for one country, credit constrained investors ask for liquidity premiums even to countries with normal fundamentals. This increase in the cost of borrowing increases incentives to default for the other countries with normal fundamentals, further constraining investors in obtaining credit through a decrease in the value of collateral. The quantitative results show that this model can generate spillover of default risk across countries. The essay in the second chapter introduces endogenous capital accumulation to a quantitative model of sovereign default based on Eaton and Gersovitz (1981). With a production technology in the model, output and interest rates are jointly determined by the interaction between a sovereign government who can optimally default and foreign creditors taking into account default risk. Adding investment enables the model to generate unique economic dynamics similar to those observed around emerging economies' default crises: (1) Emerging economies' debt crises display a boom-bust pattern. (2) A non-negligible fraction of sovereign defaults occur in good times. The essay in the third chapter explains why emerging economies borrow abroad in foreign currency. We present a two-period model in which foreign lenders offer a small open economy an optimal self-enforcing contract in which borrowing is denominated in borrowers' currency. Taking into account the government's incentive to inflate away the debt, the optimal lending contract provides consumption insurance for the economy in that the contract allows the economy for inflation in bad times but asks for deflation in good times. As the variance of income shocks for the economy increases, it gets more difficult for the contract to satisfy the incentive compatible constraints at the good income state. The numerical results are consistent with the fact that emerging economies with high income volatility suffer from "Original Sin".