Sovereign Risk and Macroeconomic Fluctuations
The series Working Papers on Economics is published by the Office for Economic Studies at the Banco de la República (Central Bank of Colombia). The works published are provisional, and their authors are fully responsible for the opinions expressed in them, as well as for possible mistakes. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Banco de la República or its Board of Directors.
This paper investigates the impact of sovereign risk on the stochastic rational expectations equilibrium of a pure exchange small open economy. International borrowing and lending arise from the interaction between a risk averse sovereign representative agent in a small open economy trying to self insure against idiosyncratic shocks and risk neutral international lenders. The credit market is imperfect because the sovereign cannot commit to repay its outstanding debt and chooses to default when it is optimal to do so. The possibility of default induces an endogenous sovereign risk premium on foreign debt and endogenous rationing by foreign creditors. The model is parameterized and solved numerically. The experiments conducted here generalize the results of Eaton and Gersovitz (1981) into environments with varying degrees of persistence and volatility in the underlying stochastic income process.
