Why do countries tend to repay their domestic and external debt, even though the legal enforcement of the sovereign debt contract is limited? Contrary to conventional wisdom, we argue that temporary market exclusion after default is costly. When the domestic financial market is characterized by a scarcity of private saving instruments, a government can partition its debt market into domestic and external segments, by restricting capital flows, to exploit its market power. The government's market power mitigates the problem of limited commitment, by making default a more costly option. Consequently, it extends the government's external debt capacity. We replicate the domestic and external sovereign debt for non-advanced economies, by unveiling their link to financial repression.

The pass-through from exchange rate changes to inflation differs depending on the underlying shock. This paper quantifies the conditional exchange rate pass-through (CERPT) to prices, i.e. the change in prices relative to that in the exchange rate following a certain exogenous shock, with a structural econometric approach using data for Sweden, a small economy that is very open to trade. We find that the pass-through to consumer prices following an exogenous exchange rate shock is rather small. Importantly, this shock is not the most important driver of exchange rate fluctuations, unlike what standard structural macroeconomic models would indicate. For Sweden, the CERPT is negative not only for domestic but also for global demand shocks. The estimated combination of shocks with positive and negative CERPT implies that the average pass-through to consumer prices is roughly zero.

No abstract

Why do countries tend to repay their domestic and external debt, even though the legal enforcement of the sovereign debt contract is limited? Contrary to conventional wisdom, we argue that temporary market exclusion after default is costly. When the domestic financial market is characterized by a scarcity of private saving instruments, a government can partition its debt market into domestic and external segments, by restricting capital flows, to exploit its market power. The government's market power mitigates the problem of limited commitment, by making default a more costly option. Consequently, it extends the government's external debt capacity. We replicate the domestic and external sovereign debt for non-advanced economies, by unveiling their link to financial repression.

No abstract