
Layna Mosley's slide deck, from the inaugural PSFL DC April 2024 conference, summarizing some of our recent and ongoing research on the domestic and international politics of sovereign finance. Our second annual conference will take place on April 22 and 23, 2025, at Princeton SPIA's Washington, DC space. We'll also co-sponsor the DebtCon8 meeting in Washington, DC, October 13-15, 2025.
Here's our April 2024 Policy Brief on elections and sovereign finance, as well as our June 2024 Policy Brief on commodity prices.
The Princeton Sovereign Finance Lab conducts policy-relevant research on the political economy of government borrowing. Our research is global in focus, with an emphasis on sovereign finance in the Global South. We consider the entire life cycle of sovereign credit, from governments’ decisions regarding how much and from which creditors to borrow; governments’ choices regarding the management and transparency of sovereign credit; and the domestic and international dynamics of servicing — and, where necessary, restructuring — sovereign obligations.
At present, many countries in the Global South have accumulated significant levels of government debt. A significant number find themselves on the brink of, or already experiencing, debt crises. Addressing the challenges of sovereign finance requires considering sovereign finance from origination to debt management to debt servicing and rollover. Many prominent features of debt crises have their roots in earlier stages of governments’ decisions regarding from which sources to borrow, how much to borrow and how to interact with international financial institutions and various creditor entities.
A focus on politics inside borrowing countries is also essential. Domestic political dynamics affect how governments act at the international level, when negotiating with their private and official sector creditors. Our domestic political economy analyses include the consideration of the effect of political institutions and events (the degree of democracy; fiscal accountability practices; mechanisms for debt transparency; the electoral cycle) on access to and pricing of sovereign finance. This focus also considers the domestic distributional consequences of debt burdens: who within a polity bears the costs of debt servicing, restructuring or austerity? How do anticipated distributional dynamics affect governments’ expectations of their own political survival? By casting light on the internal politics related to sovereign finance, we can better understand challenges at the international level, such as the need for inter-creditor coordination.

PSFL members at the 2025 Political Economy of International Organization meeting, Harvard University, January 23. (Mengfan Chan, Qi Liu, Peter Rosendorff, Zoe Ge, Nicolas Bau, Tetsekela Anyiam-Osigwe, Layna Mosley, Simone Dietrich, Fiona Bare)