Essays on Sovereign Default

This dissertation contributes to literature of International Economics and, in particular, of Sovereign Default with the study of three distinct issues.;In the first chapter, I study the role of international reserves in sovereign debt restructuring episodes when fiscal adjustment is costly. This study departs from the observation that highly indebted developing economies, commonly also hold large external reserves. This behavior seems puzzling given that governments in these countries borrow with an interest rate penalty to compensate lenders for default risk. Reducing debt to the same extent as reserves would maintain net liabilities constant while decreasing interest payments. However, holding reserves can have insurance benefits in a financial crisis. To rationalize the levels of international reserves and external debt observed in the data, a standard dynamic model of equilibrium default is extended to include distortionary taxation and debt restructuring. This chapter shows that fiscal adjustments induced by sovereign default can generate large demand for reserves if taxation is distortionary. At the same time, a non-negligible position in reserves modifies the debt restructuring negotiations upon default. A calibrated version of the model produces recovery rate schedules that are increasing with reserves, as seen in the data, being also able to replicate large positions of reserves and debt to GDP. Finally, I study how both mechanisms play a key quantitative role to generate such result, in fact, not including them, produces a counterfactual demand for reserves that is close to zero.;In the second chapter, the relationship between labor market distortions and sovereign debt crises is explored. It is noted that risk of sovereign debt default has frequently affected both emerging market and developed economies. Such financial crises are often accompanied with severe declines of employment that are hard to justify using a standard dynamic stochastic model. In this chapter, I document that a labor wedge deteriorates substantially around swift reversals of current accounts or default episodes. I propose and evaluate two different explanations for these movements by linking the wedges to changes in labor taxes and in the cost of working capital. With these two features included, a dynamic model of equilibrium default is able to replicate the behavior of the labor wedge observed in the data around financial crisis. In the model, higher interest rates are propagated into larger costs of hiring labor through the presence of working capital. As an economy is hit with a stream of bad productivity shocks, the incentives to default become stronger, thus increasing the cost of debt. This reduces firm demand for labor and generates a labor wedge. A similar effect is obtained with a counter-cyclical tax rate policy. The model is used to shed light on the recent events of the Euro Area debt crisis and in particular of the Greek default event.;Finally, in the third chapter, I develop a debt-to-output decomposition and document that a large fraction of the increase in the debt to output ratio during default is accounted by variations in the exchange rate. Also, using a large dataset on historical sovereign debt crises, it is shown in this chapter that devaluations of the exchange rate during periods of default are positively associated with international investor losses (haircuts) when debt is restructured. These results can be rationalized with the fact that large real devaluation decrease output when measured in foreign goods, thus reducing the availability of resources that can be used during negotiations. This implies that exchange rate fluctuations are an important source of risk in emerging economies affecting, among other things, debt dynamics and restructuring outcomes. As such, I conclude that most of the exchange rate neglect, typical in the sovereign default literature, should be seriously reconsidered.