Published Papers / Documentos Publicados
ABSTRACTA main puzzle in the sovereign debt literature is that defaults have only minor effects on subsequent borrowing costs and access to credit. This paper comes to a different conclusion. We construct the first complete database of investor losses (“haircuts”) in all restructurings with foreign banks and bondholders from 1970 until 2010, covering 180 cases in 68 countries. We then show that restructurings involving higher haircuts are associated with significantly higher subsequent bond yield spreads and longer periods of capital market exclusion. The results cast doubt on the widespread belief that credit markets “forgive and forget.”
ABSTRACT
The country credit rating is a key covariate of the cost and availability of international financing for an economy. This paper models ratings as a function of expected repayment capacity, derives empirical implications, and tests them using the most comprehensive consistent series of sovereign credit ratings. These are the Institutional Investor ratings which have been widely used in the international finance literature. We report several stylized facts: volatility clustering, asymmetric adjustments, and serial correlation in credit revisions, especially in Emerging countries. These features are consistent with rational behavior of credit rating teams and have important implications in assessing the long term risk of international investments.