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Working Paper
The United States as a heavily indebted country
According to data published by the Department of Commerce, the U.S. net international investment position (roughly the net external debt position with its sign reversed) at the end of 1987 was a negative $368 billion. This sum represents a deterioration of about $100 billion from the end-1986 level. The sharp downward plunge in the United States' net international investment position in recent years is, of course, a reflection of the large current account deficits recorded during most of the 1980s. In this paper, the U.S. net external debt position is examined and compared with the experience ...
Working Paper
Maturity, indebtedness, and default risk
In this paper, the authors advance the theory and computation of Eaton-Gersovitz style models of sovereign debt by incorporating long-term debt and proving the existence of an equilibrium price function with the property that the interest rate on debt is increasing in the amount borrowed and implementing a novel method of computing the equilibrium accurately. Using Argentina as a test case, they show that incorporating long-term debt allows the model to match the average external debt-to-output ratio, average spread on external debt, the standard deviation of spreads and simultaneously ...
Report
Capital flows & current account deficits in the 1990s: why did Latin America & East Asian countries respond differently?
The return of private capital to highly indebted less-developed countries (LDCs) in the late 1980s was accompanied by widening current account deficits in the recipient countries, which were primarily attributed to a consumption boom in Latin America and an investment surge in East Asia. Interpreting the return as an increase in the external debt ceiling, the maximum amount that can be borrowed, this paper analyzes and compares the different response of the two regions using the conceptual framework of a borrowing-constrained agent. According to it, an increase in the debt ceiling can reduce ...
Working Paper
On the solvency of nations: are global imbalances consistent with intertemporal budget constraints?
Theory predicts that a nation's stochastic intertemporal budget constraint is satisfied if net foreign assets (NFA) are integrated of any finite order, or if net exports (NX) and NFA satisfy an error-correction specification with a residual integrated of any finite order. We test these conditions using data for 21 industrial and 29 emerging economies for the 1970-2004 period. The results show that, despite the large global imbalances of recent years, NFA and NX positions are consistent with external solvency. Country-specific unit root tests on NFA-GDP ratios suggest that nearly all of them ...
Working Paper
Can debtor countries service their debts? Income and price elasticities for exports of developing countries
Interest in income and price elasticities for international trade has increased recently because of the debt crisis that many developing countries are experiencing. Estimates of income elasticities of import demand, however, range from a low of 1.3 to a high of 4.7. Such differences have important implications for debtor and creditor countries alike. Using quarterly data for the period 1973-1981, this paper estimates income and price elasticities for non-oil imports of five major industrial countries from non-OPEC developing countries. The empirical results suggest that the income elasticity ...
Journal Article
Commercial bank financing of world payment imbalance
Journal Article
The Baker Plan: a new initiative
Journal Article
Commercial bank lending to developing countries
Journal Article
Determinants and impact of sovereign credit ratings
The authors conduct the first systematic analysis of the determinants and impact of the sovereign credit ratings assigned by the two leading U.S. agencies, Moody's Investor Services and Standard and Poor's. Of the large number of criteria used by the two agencies, six factors appear to play an important role in determining a country's credit rating: per capita income, GDP growth, inflation, external debt, level of economic development, and default history. In addition, the authors find that sovereign ratings influence market yields--particularly those on non-investment-grade ...
Journal Article
International debt management