Risk Management for Sovereign Financing within a Debt Sustainability Framework

2018

The mix of instruments used to finance a sovereign is a key determinant of debt sustainability through its effect on funding costs and risks. We extend standard debt sustainability analysis to incorporate debt-financing decisions in the presence of macroeconomic, financial, and fiscal risks. We optimize the maturity of debt instruments to trade off borrowing costs with refinancing risk. Risk is quantified with a coherent measure of tail risk of financing needs, conditional Flow-at-Risk. A constraint on the pace of reduction of debt stocks is also imposed, and we model the effect of debt stocks on the yield curve through endogenous risk and term premia. On a simulated economy, we show that t…