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200 Years of Sovereign Debt Crises: Serial Restructurings May Be Accompanied by Higher Creditor Losses

Many sovereign defaults have occurred worldwide over the past 200 years. An analysis of 321 sovereign debt restructurings since 1815 shows that foreign private and institutional investor losses were 43 percent on average. Notably, beginning in the 1970s, several debt exchanges have increasingly been required to resolve a default. To understand this new phenomenon better, this Weekly Report looks at ...

Sovereign Haircuts: 200 Years of Creditor Losses

We study sovereign external debt crises over the past 200 years, with a focus on creditor losses, or “haircuts.” Our sample covers 327 sovereign debt restructurings with external private creditors over 205 default spells since 1815. Creditor losses vary widely (from none to 100%), but the statistical distribution has remained remarkably stable over two centuries, with an average haircut of around 45 ...

An Estimation and Decomposition of the Government Investment Multiplier

We construct a narrative instrument for government investment from official records in Germany. Using structural vector autoregressions, we document a significant crowding-in of private investment and an output multiplier of roughly 2. Then, we match a New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to the empirical responses, and we decompose the multiplier into three channels. Public investment ...

Construction of a Narrative Instrument for Government Investment

The article documents the construction of a narrative instrument for government investment, used in the paper ‘An Estimation and Decomposition of the Government Investment Multiplier’.

Sovereign vs. Corporate Debt and Default: More Similar than You Think

Theory suggests that corporate and sovereign bonds are fundamentally different, also because sovereign debt has no bankruptcy mechanism and is hard to enforce. We show empirically that the two assets are more similar than you think, at least when it comes to high-yield bonds over the past 20 years. Based on rich new data we compare risky US corporate bonds (“junk” bonds) to risky emerging market sovereign ...

Labour Supply and Survivor Insurance in the Netherlands

This paper investigates the effects of survivor benefits (SB) on the labour supply of widows. Using richadministrative data on the Dutch population and a reform that considerably restricted eligibility to SB, weidentify the causal effect of SB on labour supply. Using a regression discontinuity design strategy based onthe cohort-based implementation of the reform, we show that labour income after spousal ...

Social Security and Retirement around the World: Lessons from a Long-Term Collaboration

Declining labor force participation of older men throughout the 20th century and recent increases in participation have generated substantial interest in understanding the effect of public pensions on retirement. The National Bureau of Economic Research's International Social Security (ISS) Project, a long-term collaboration among researchers in a dozen developed countries, has explored this and related ...

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The Political Economy of Fossil Fuel Subsidy Removal: Evidence from Bolivia and Mexico

We study the impact of fossil fuel subsidy removal on presidential popularity using difference-indifference approaches and a stylized theoretical model. Analyzing macro level data for two subsidy removal events in Mexico and Bolivia in the early 2010s, we find evidence of a negative impact on presidential approval. Our theoretical probabilistic voting model predicts that the decline in popularity is ...

Financial Repression in General Equilibrium: The Case of the United States, 1948–1974

Financial repression lowers the return on government debt and contributes, all else equal, towards its liquidation. However, its full effect on the debt-to-GDP ratio hinges on how repression impacts the economy at large because it alters investment and saving decisions. We develop and estimate a New Keynesian model with financial repression. Based on U.S. data for the period 1948–1974, we find, consistent ...