The Public Sector Credit Framework is an open source tool for estimating the default risk of and assigning ratings to government debt.
The C program performs a multi-year budget simulation using random number generation routines from the open source Boost C++ Library.
[8] Reporter Joseph Cotterill noted that the framework had the potential to produce "a view of sovereign credit free of the subjectivity and bias that could creep into more qualitatively-based ratings judgements."
In July 2012, the software was covered on The Lang and O'Leary Exchange, a prime time business program on CBC.
[12] Later that month, the developers of PSCF released an Italian sovereign default probability model which was reported in the daily version of Milano Finanza, MF.
Economist Krassimir Petrov discussed the weaknesses of sovereign bond ratings and the potential role of PSCF in improving them in a November 30, 2013 post in Naked Capitalism.
[17] Diane Lim, then Chief Economist for the Concord Coalition, discussed PSCF and its implications for US Treasury rates in The Tabulation on September 6, 2013.
[18] In October 2012, the Macdonald-Lauirer Institute published a study entitled "Provincial Solvency and Federal Obligations" [19] which contained default probability estimates for the ten Canadian provinces generated by PSCF.