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One reason countries pay their debts: renegotiation and international trade
This paper estimates the effect of sovereign debt renegotiation on international trade. Sovereign default may be associated with a subsequent decline in international trade either because creditors want to deter default by debtors, or because trade finance dries up after default. To estimate the effect, I use an empirical gravity model of bilateral trade and a large panel data set covering fifty years and more than 200 trading partners. The model controls for a host of factors that influence bilateral trade flows, including the incidence of International Monetary Fund programs. Using the ...
Working Paper
Policy Interventions in Sovereign Debt Restructurings
The wave of sovereign defaults in the early 1980s and the string of debt crises in the decades that followed have fostered proposals involving policy interventions in sovereign debt restructurings. A key question about these proposals that has proved hard to handle is how they in influence the behavior of creditors and debtors. We address such challenge by incorporating these policy proposals into a quantitative model in the tradition of Eaton and Gersovitz (1981) that includes renegotiation in sovereign debt restructurings. Critically, the model also endogenizes the choice of debt maturity, ...
Working Paper
Sovereign Debt Restructurings
Sovereign debt crises involve debt restructurings characterized by a mix of face-value haircuts and maturity extensions. The prevalence of maturity extensions has been hard to reconcile with economic theory. We develop a model of endogenous debt restructuring that captures key facts of sovereign debt and restructuring episodes. While debt dilution pushes for negative maturity extensions, three factors are important in overcoming the effects of dilution and generating maturity extensions upon restructurings: income recovery after default, credit exclusion after restructuring, and regulatory ...