Governments choose to issue risky or riskless debt depending on the nature of the stochastic process of output. We use Brownian motion and Poisson shocks a modeling method in the literature on corporate default known as Levy processes to approximate a decomposition of the output process into a smooth and a jump component. Using an Eaton and Gersovitz (1981) model of debt repudiation, we show that the Brownian part explains the counter-cyclical behavior of the current account, and the Poisson part explains the risk of default thus enabling our model to account for key stylized facts regarding sovereign risk. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.