Risk Sharing with the Monarch
RISK SHARING WITH THE MONARCH: CONTINGENT DEBT AND EXCUSABLE DEFAULTS IN THE AGE OF PHILIP II, 1556–1598* Mauricio Drelichman Hans-Joachim Voth The University of British Columbia ICREA/Universitat Pompeu Fabra and and CIFAR CREI This Draft: June 2012 Abstract: Contingent sovereign debt can create important welfare gains. Nonetheless, there is almost no issuance today. Using hand-collected archival data, we examine the first known case of large-scale use of state-contingent sovereign debt in history. Philip II of Spain entered into hundreds of contracts whose value and due date depended on verifiable, exogenous events such as the arrival of silver fleets. We show that this allowed for effective risk-sharing between the king and his bankers. The data also strongly suggest that the defaults that occurred were excusable – they were simply contingencies over which Crown and bankers had not contracted previously. * We are grateful to Fernando Broner, Sebastian Edwards, Xavier Gabaix, Ed Leamer, Tim Leunig, Kris Mitchener, Richard Portes, Moritz Schularick, Richard Sylla, Jaume Ventura, Paul Wachtel, Mark Wright and seminar participants at CIFAR, Caltech, Colorado, Carlos III, ESSEC/THEMA, NYU-Stern, LSE, ESSIM, UCLA-Anderson, and Copenhagen Business School. Drelichman acknowledges financial support from SSHRCC, CIFAR, and the UBC Hampton Fund. Voth thanks the Spanish Education Ministry for a research grant. All errors are ours. I. Introduction The issuance of non-contingent sovereign debt can be destabilizing. It requires pro- cyclical fiscal policies, which aggravate recessions (Eichengreen 2002). In the extreme, outstanding non-contingent debts can no longer be serviced in bad times. After defaults, GDP typically falls, trade plummets, and banking systems have to be recapitalized.1 Economists and policy-makers alike have argued that the issuance of debt indexed to GDP (or to export prices) could reduce the risk of bankruptcy and smooth consumption (Borensztein and Mauro 2004; Kletzer et al.
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