The Stock of External Sovereign Debt: Can We Take the Data At 'Face Value'?

Daniel A. Dias, Christine J. Richmond, Mark L.J. Wright

NBER Working Paper No. 17551
Issued in October 2011

---- Acknowledgements -----

The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the Federal Reserve System, the National Bureau of Economic Research, the IMF or IMF policy. The authors thank Marcio Garcia for help researching Brazilian debt issuance, and Moritz Schularick and numerous seminar participants for comments. Further comments welcome. We are especially grateful to Aart Kraay, Ibrahim Levent and Gloria Moreno of the World Bank for helping us access these data, and understand its idiosyncrasies. The authors would like to thank the Center for International Business and Economic Research (CIBER) at UCLA for research support. Wright would also like to thank the National Science Foundation for research support under grant SES-1059829. All remaining errors are our own.

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