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Working Paper
Official Debt Restructurings and Development
Despite the frequency of official debt restructurings, little systematic evidence has been produced on their characteristics and implications. Using a dataset covering more than 400 Paris Club agreements, this paper fills that gap. It provides a comprehensive description of the evolving characteristics of these operations and studies their impact on debtors. The progressive introduction of new terms of treatment gradually turned the Paris Club from an institution primarily concerned with preserving creditors? claims into an instrument to foster development in the world?s poorer nations, among ...
Working Paper
Quantifying Risks to Sovereign Market Access: Methods and Challenges
In this paper we use data from the euro area to study episodes when sovereigns lose market access. We construct a detailed dataset with potential indicators of market access tensions, and evaluate their ability to forecast episodes when market access is lost, using various econometric approaches. We find that factors associated with high market access tensions are not limited to financial markets, but also encompass developments in global demand, macroeconomic conditions and the fiscal stance. Using the top-performing indicators, we construct a number of market tension indices and use them as ...
Working Paper
Bank and sovereign risk feedback loops
Measures of Sovereign and Bank Risk show occasional bouts of increased correlation, setting the stage for vicious and virtuous feedback loops. This paper models the macroeconomic phenomena underlying such bouts using CDS data for 10 euro-area countries. The results show that Sovereign Risk feeds back into Bank Risk more strongly than vice versa. Countries with sovereigns that are more indebted or where banks have a larger exposure to their own sovereign, suffer larger feedback loop effects from Sovereign Risk into Bank Risk. In the opposite direction, in countries where banks fund their ...
Working Paper
International reserves and gross capital flows: dynamics during financial stress
This paper explores the role of international reserves as a stabilizer of international capital flows during periods of global financial stress. In contrast with previous contributions, aimed at explaining net capital flows, we focus on the behavior of gross capital flows. We analyze an extensive cross-country quarterly database using event analyses and standard panel regressions. We document significant heterogeneity in the response of resident investors to financial stress and relate it to a previously undocumented channel through which reserves are useful during financial stress. ...
Working Paper
Selective sovereign defaults
Breaches in intercreditor equity are common ground during sovereign debt restructurings. In this paper I explore residence-based breaches by studying patterns of discrimination between residents and foreign creditors during debt restructurings. I frame the analysis with a simple model of a government's strategic decision to differentiate between the servicing of its domestic and its external debt. In the model, the basic trade-off facing the authorities is to default on external debt and in so doing restricting private access to international capital markets or to default on domestic debt, ...
Working Paper
Does the IMF's official support affect sovereign bonds maturities?
This paper looks at whether the tendency of some governments to borrow short term is reinforced by financial support from the International Monetary Fund. I first present a model of sovereign debt issuance at various maturities featuring endogenous liquidity crises and maturity mismatches due to financial under-development. I use the model to analyse the impact of IMF lending during debt crises on the sovereign's optimal maturity structure. Within the model, although IMF assistance is able to catalyse private flows, this provides incentives for government to issue larger amounts of short-term ...
Working Paper
Sovereign debt crises: could an international court minimize them?
This paper discusses the merits of the statutory approach to sovereign debt crises. It presents a model of sovereign debt roll-overs where, in the event of a liquidity crisis, a Sovereign Bankruptcy Court has powers to declare a standstill on debt payments. The model shows the ability of the Court to mitigate the coordination problem inherent to roll-overs in sovereign debt markets. Moreover, the scale of the coordination problem is reduced regardless of the quality of the information handled by the Court. The mere existence of the Court forces investors to focus on its course of action ...
Working Paper
Sovereign debt restructurings and the IMF: implications for future official interventions
This paper studies the role played by the IMF during sovereign debt restructurings and extracts lessons for future official interventions. To do so, I compare twelve recent debt restructurings. I begin by detailing the main features (?restructuring strategies?) of each episode. I then analyze the involvement of the Fund and relate it to the above-cited strategies. Despite the wide heterogeneity both in restructuring strategies and in the scope of IMF?s involvement, the Fund exerted a substantial influence. This influence came, not only through the provision of official finance and by setting ...
Working Paper
Bank crises and sovereign defaults in emerging markets: exploring the links
This paper provides a set of stylized facts on the mechanisms through which banking and sovereign distress feed into each other, using a large sample of emerging economies over three decades. We first define ?twin crises? as events where banking crises and sovereign defaults combine, and further distinguish between those banking crises that end up in sovereign debt crises, and vice-versa. We then assess what differentiates ?single? episodes from ?twin? ones. Using an event analysis methodology, we study the behavior around crises of variables describing the balance sheet interconnection ...
Working Paper
Banking on seniority: the IMF and the sovereign’s creditors
The programs designed by the International Monetary Fund during the Global Financial Crisis have shown more awareness of the importance of domestic demand for the prospects of economic recovery. Yet, the IMF has continued to do little about the late payments made by governments to domestic creditors and suppliers. In contrast, the greater protection historically awarded by the IMF to foreign creditors has endured throughout the recent crisis. The paper suggests that, in order to adequately balance foreign creditor seniority and growth objectives, the IMF may sometimes need to emphasize ...