Essays on Sovereign Debt Crisis

Abstract

This thesis consists of three chapters that aim to develop economic models to explain sovereign debt crises. Chapter 2 provides the dynamic general equilibrium model of endogenous sovereign default, incorporating financial intermediaries. By a government's decision to default, government bonds become non-performing and financial intermediaries eliminate them from their net worth. While other literature on endogenous default models assumes that the default state is exogenously given, only depending on TFP or endowment, the model in Chapter 2 creates a mechanism by which the default state is contingent on the amount of debt outstanding in the non-default state. Through this feature, the model quantifies the financial amplification effect on the economy and shows the phenomenon of "Too-Big-to-Default". The model explains the important features of the Argentinean default in 2001, capturing the default frequency, the debt-to-GDP ratio and moments of main variables. Chapter 3 proposes a new sovereign debt crisis model which is applicable to an advanced country, assuming the government's incapability to serve its debts rather than willingness of repayment. The fiscal limit is defined as the sum of discounted future primary surplus under the tax rate to maximize tax revenue. When the debt outstanding exceeds the fiscal limit, the government falls into debt crisis. The economic contraction in the crisis results from the exogenous tax rate and decreased imported inputs. The model replicates the high debt-to-GDP ratio, which the endogenous model cannot assume, and captures movements of important variables of the Spanish debt crisis in around 2012. Chapter 4 introduce foreign bonds based on the model in Chapter 3, for the analysis of several countries such as Greece and Ireland in which a majority of bonds is held by foreign agents. In the model, the government issues bonds for foreign investors, and that leads the outflow of domestic output. Instead of government bonds, households adopt capital for their inter-temporal utility maximization. Also, the fiscal limit is drawn from the exogenous distribution. The simulation result for the Greek economy generally explains the contraction of its economy by the crisis in around 2012 although the effect of imported inputs is overestimated and that of domestic inputs is underestimated. Show more