The Aftermath of Sovereign Debt Crises: A Narrative Approach
Default is as old as sovereign debt. Since 1820, countries that issued sovereign debt have spent 18% of time in a state of default. Despite the scale of the problem, the causes and consequences of defaults are still imperfectly understood. In this paper we quantify the aggregate cost of defaults, based on a large panel of 50 sovereigns between 1870 and 2010. Since defaults are endogenous to the bu