an instrument to store liquidity. As the government defaults, domestic banks’ liquidity decreases
and this affects their ability to lend. In their empirical analysis, their identification strategy
focuses on the cross-section. The authors collect information on 110 defaults for 81 countries
between 1980 and 2005. The main estimation of the paper tests whether banking sectors with
larger net claims on the government reduce their private credit to GDP more severely during
sovereign default episodes. The results are economically significant, as a one standard deviation
increase in a banking sector’s exposure to a defaulting sovereign implies a larger reduction in
private credit to GDP of about 2.5 percent.
These results are also significant at the bank level. In a subsequent paper, Gennaioli,
Martin, and Rossi (2013b) use a sample of roughly 4000 banks in 140 countries to analyze the
effect of individual banks’ exposures to government debt on lending during 12 sovereign
defaults between 1998 and 2012. The authors find that banks with larger exposures to
government debt, in an episode when their own-sovereign defaults, decrease lending by more
relative to their total assets. This result is mostly explained by banks’ “permanent” holding of
government debt, as opposed to “transitory” increases in government debt holdings during these
crisis episodes.
As shown by these studies, sovereign debt crises have a significant effect on domestic
credit. This negative shock is compounded by the marked effect that sovereign crises also have
on firms’ access to foreign sources of credit. Arteta and Hale (2008) find that countries enduring
a debt crisis have limited access to international debt markets. The impact is stronger for nonfinancial
private firms that do not export their goods and services.
As a whole, these results provide some direct evidence on the effect of sovereign defaults
on domestic and cross-border bank lending, which could translate into aggregate macroeconomic