Motivated by the recent European debt crisis, this paper investigates the scope for a bailout guarantee in a sovereign debt crisis. Defaults may arise from negative income shocks, government impatience or a "sunspot"-coordinated buyers strike. We introduce a bailout agency, and characterize the minimal actuarially fair intervention that guarantees the no-buyers-strike fundamental equilibrium, relying on the market for residual financing. The intervention makes it cheaper for governments to borrow, inducing them borrow more, leaving default probabilities possibly rather unchanged. The maximal backstop will be pulled precisely when fundamentals worsen.

The purpose of this paper is to report on a comparison of several alternative numerical solution techniques for nonlinear rational expectations models. The comparison was made by asking individual researchers to apply their different solution techniques to a simple representative agent, optimal, stochastic growth model. Decision rules as well as simulated time series are compared. The differences among the methods turned out to be quite substantial for certain aspects of the growth model. Therefore, researchers might want to be careful not to rely blindly on the results of any chosen numerical solution method in applied work.