Las crisis de refinanciación en los mercados de deuda soberana

We present a simple dynamic model in which the government of a small, open economy can experience a financial crisis during which it defaults on its sovereign debt. Whether or not a crisis occurs can depend on the expectations of international investors as well as on fundamental factors like changes in national income and changes in the international interest rate. In our model, if investors expect a crisis to occur, they do not purchase new bonds issued by the government and the government is unable to refinance its existing debt. We refer to the crises that depend on fundamentals as solvency crises and the crises that depend on self-fulfilling expectations of investors as rollover crises. As in other models of debt crises, the government can eliminate the possibility of a crisis by lowering its total stock of debt. Unlike in models in which crises depend only on changes in fundamentals, the government can eliminate the possibility of a liquidity crisis occurring by lengthening the maturity of its debt and thereby reducing its refinancing needs.