Sovereign Debt Renegotiation and Credit Default Swaps

A credit default swap (CDS) contract provides insurance against default. After a country defaults, the country and its lenders usually negotiate over the share of the defaulted debt to be repaid. This paper incorporates CDS contracts into a sovereign default model and demonstrates that the existence of a CDS market results in lower default probability, higher debt levels, and lower financing costs for the country. Since the CDS payout is not automatically triggered by losses from renegotiations, the lender needs to be compensated for lower expected insurance payments. This leads to higher debt repayment in renegotiation, decreasing the benefits of defaulting, and hence allowing the country to borrow more at lower rates. Uncertainty over the insurance payout when the debt is renegotiated explains why in the data, as the output declines, the CDS spread becomes lower than the bond spread. Furthermore, this pricing dynamic during a debt crisis can be used to infer market perceptions of the probability of the CDS paying out after a renegotiation. The model is calibrated to Greek data and shows that increasing CDS levels from 0 to 5% of debt lowers the unconditional default probability from 2.6% to 2.0% per year with no impact on debt level. Further increasing the CDS to 40% of debt increases the equilibrium debt level by 15%, but also increases the probability of default to 3.1%.