Sovereign defaults and banking crises

Sovereign defaults feature three key empirical regularities regarding the domestic banking systems: (i) defaults and banking crises happen together, (ii) banks are largely exposed to government debt, (iii) defaults trigger major contractions in bank credit and production. We rationalize these phenomena by extending a traditional default framework to incorporate bankers who lend to both government and firms. When bankers are exposed to government debt, a default generates a banking crisis, which triggers collapses in corporate credit and output. Calibrated to the 2001-02 Argentine default, the model produces equilibrium crises at observed frequencies, sharp credit contractions, and output drops of 7%.