Analytics of sovereign debt restructuring

This paper develops a simple theoretical model to analyse recent proposals on restructuring of sovereign bonds. We find that collective action clauses (CACs) inserted in bonds resolve the inefficiencies caused by intra-creditor coordination problems providing that all parties have complete information about each other's preferences. In such a world, statutory mechanisms, such as international bankruptcy courts, are unnecessary. This is no longer the case when the benefits from reaching a restructuring agreement are private information to the debtor and its creditors due to inefficiencies caused by the debtor-creditor bargaining problem.     

Renegotiation, collective action clauses and sovereign debt markets

Collective action clauses (CACs) are provisions specifying that a supermajority of bondholders can change the terms of a bond. We study how CACs determine governments' fiscal incentives, sovereign bond prices, and default probabilities in environments with and without contingent debt and IMF presence. We claim that CACs are likely to be an irrelevant dimension of debt contracts in current sovereign debt markets because of the variety of instruments utilized by sovereigns and the implicit IMF guarantee. Nonetheless, under a new international bankruptcy regime like that recently proposed by the IMF, CACs can increase significantly the cost of borrowing for sovereigns, contrary to what is suggested in previous empirical literature.     

“Rules of thumb” for sovereign debt crises

This paper investigates the economic and political conditions that are associated to the occurrence of a sovereign debt crisis. We use a new statistical approach (Classification and Regression Tree) that allows us to derive a collection of “rules of thumb” that help identify the typical characteristics of defaulters. We find that not all crises are equal: they differ depending on whether the government faces insolvency, illiquidity, or various macroeconomic risks. We also characterize the set of fundamentals that can be associated with a relatively “risk-free” zone. This classification is important for discussing appropriate policy options to prevent crises and improve response time and prediction.     

Sovereign debt crises and credit to the private sector

We use micro-level data to analyze emerging markets' private sector access to international debt markets during sovereign debt crises. We find that these crises are systematically accompanied by a decline in foreign credit to domestic private firms, both during debt renegotiations and for over two years after restructuring agreements are reached. This decline is large, statistically significant, and robust. We find that this effect is concentrated in the non-financial sector and is different for firms in the exporting and in the non-exporting sectors. We also find that the magnitude of the effect depends on the type of debt restructuring agreement.     

Long-duration bonds and sovereign defaults

This paper extends the baseline framework used in recent quantitative studies of sovereign default by assuming that the government can borrow using long-duration bonds. This contrasts with previous studies, which assume the government can borrow using bonds that mature after one quarter. We show that, when we assume that the government issues bonds with a duration similar to the average duration of sovereign bonds in emerging economies, the model generates an interest rate that is substantially higher and more volatile than the one obtained assuming one-quarter bonds. This narrows the gap between the predictions of the model and the data, which indicates that the introduction of long-duration bonds may be a useful tool for future research about emerging economies. Our analysis is also relevant for the study of other credit markets.     

Hares and stags in Argentinean debt restructuring

The latest Argentinean debt restructuring was the first time the resolution of a modern financial crisis was completely handed over to the private financial markets without official intervention by public institutions. We argue that the resulting harshest haircut for private creditors in history can be at least partially related to a stag-hunt game played by creditors. We show that incentive schemes provided by the Argentinean government were factors facilitating this haircut. The analysis suggests that, contrary to the recognition in the literature, the effects of Collective Action Clauses and Exit Consents within a restructuring process are not equal. In the case of Argentina, the inclusion of Collective Action Clauses in the defaulted bonds could have benefited the holdout creditors.     

News and sovereign default risk in small open economies

This paper builds a unified model of sovereign debt, default risk, and news shocks. News shocks improve the quantitative performance of the sovereign default model in a number of empirically-relevant dimensions. First, with news shocks, not all defaults occur during downturns. Second, the news shocks help account for key differences between developing and more developed economies: as the precision of news improves, the model predicts lower variability of consumption, less countercyclical trade balance and interest rate spreads, as well as a higher level of debt in line with more developed economies. Third, the model captures the hump-shaped relationship between default rates and the precision of news obtained from the data. Finally, the news shocks have a nonmonotonic effect on welfare.     

An interest rate defense of a fixed exchange rate?

Defending a government's exchange-rate commitment with active interest rate policy is not an option in first-generation models of speculative attacks. In those models, the interest rate is the passive reflection of currency-depreciation expectations. In this paper, we show how to adapt the first-generation framework to allow for an interest rate defense. It is shown that increasing domestic currency interest rate before the attack makes domestic assets more attractive according to an asset substitution effect, but weakens the domestic currency by increasing the government's fiscal liabilities. As a result, an interest rate defense can be successful only conditional on sound fiscal policy.     

Gunboats, reputation, and sovereign repayment: lessons from the Southern Confederacy

Many states that formed the Southern Confederacy defaulted on sovereign debt sold in international capital markets during the 1840s. The Confederacy also elected President Jefferson Davis, who openly advocated the repudiation of U.S. states' debts while a member of Congress. Despite its poor credit record, the Confederate government managed to float cotton bonds in England that constituted under 2% of its expenditures. The bonds were largely issued to settle overdue debts with gun contractors who had cut off trade credit. The South serviced the bonds as late as March 1865, a time of domestic hyperinflation and weeks before the fall of Richmond. Although the Confederate experience shows that trade sanctions can promote debt repayment, the gunboat model can only account for a small amount of lending. A reputation or another type of sanction would be necessary to support higher levels of lending in international capital markets.     

Basic analytics of multilateral lending and surveillance

I analyse the role of multilateral financial institutions in a world of global capital markets assuming that they have an informational advantage over private lenders in the market for sovereign debt. I show that the adverse selection problem in this market may be solved through certification if the multilateral agency does not care too much about borrower country welfare. However, with lending the private information of the agency will be revealed whatever its weighting of borrower welfare vs. private lenders' profits. Multilateral lending on concessional terms also alleviates the moral hazard problem — that investment in creditworthy borrowers is reduced as private lenders seek to avoid ex post default by constraining credit.     

Defaultable debt, interest rates and the current account

World capital markets have experienced large scale sovereign defaults on a number of occasions. In this paper we develop a quantitative model of debt and default in a small open economy. We use this model to match four empirical regularities regarding emerging markets: defaults occur in equilibrium, interest rates are countercyclical, net exports are countercyclical, and interest rates and the current account are positively correlated. We highlight the role of the stochastic trend in emerging markets, in an otherwise standard model with endogenous default, to match these facts.     

Relative price volatility under Sudden Stops: The relevance of balance sheet effects

Sudden Stops are associated with increased volatility in relative prices. We introduce a model based on information acquisition to rationalize this increased volatility. An empirical analysis of the conditional variance of the wholesale price to consumer price ratio using panel ARCH techniques confirms the relevance of Sudden Stops and potential balance sheet effects as key determinants of relative price volatility, where balance sheet effects are captured by the interaction of a proxy for potential changes in the real exchange rate (linked to the degree of external leverage of the absorption of tradable goods) and a measure of domestic liability dollarization.     

Infrastructure,returns to scale and sovereign debt

This paper explores the nexus between the issue of sovereign debt and investment in infrastructure, emphasizing the case of economies of scale. The focus is on debt contracts that are incentive compatible. It is shown that public and private financial institutions may need to lend amounts above some threshold to force the borrowing sovereign to take full advantage of any economies of scale that may be present. Low levels of lending may or may not result in default. Sufficiently high amounts of lending may be needed to ensure repayment and may prove to be mutually beneficial.     

Do stronger patent rights raise high-tech exports to the developing world?

Despite over 20 years of debate, the TRIPs agreement remains very contentious. This paper evaluates the impact of strengthening patent rights (PRs) in developing countries on developed countries' exports over the 1962-2000 period. Colonial origin is used to isolate exogenous variation in PRs. The impact is then identified by examining the cross-industry difference in sensitivity to PRs. I find that the increase in PRs made in response to the TRIPs agreement added about $35 billion (2000 US dollars) to the value of developed countries' patent-sensitive exports into 18 developing countries. This amount is equivalent to an 8.6% increase in these developing countries' annual value of patent-sensitive imports. The increase in the value of exports was driven by a quantity, rather than a price, increase.     

International trade in durable goods: Understanding volatility, cyclicality, and elasticities

Data for OECD countries document: 1. imports and exports are about three times as volatile as GDP; 2. imports and exports are pro-cyclical, and positively correlated with each other; 3. net exports are counter-cyclical. Standard models fail to replicate the behavior of imports and exports, though they can match net exports relatively well. Inspired by the fact that a large fraction of international trade is in durable goods, we propose a two-country two-sector model in which durable goods are traded across countries. Our model can match the business cycle statistics on the volatility and comovement of the imports and exports relatively well. The model is able to match many dimensions of the data, which suggests that trade in durable goods may be an important element in open-economy macro models.     

Habit formation and the present-value model of the current account: Yet another suspect

In a recent paper, Gruber (Gruber, J.W., 2004. A present value test of habits and the current account. Journal of Monetary Economics 51, 1495-1507) claims that habit formation in consumption plays an important role in current account fluctuations in selected developed countries, extending the present-value model of the current account (PVM) with consumption habits. In this paper, however, I show that the habit-forming PVM is observationally equivalent to the PVM augmented with persistent transitory consumption, which is induced by world real interest rate shocks. Based on a small open-economy real business cycle (SOE-RBC) model endowed with consumption habits as well as persistent world real interest rate shocks, this paper resolves the inherent identification problem of the habit-forming PVM by Bayesian methods to seek effects of habit formation on current account fluctuations in typical small open economies, Canada and the United Kingdom. Results reveal no clear evidence that habit formation plays a crucial role in current account fluctuations.     

Oil shocks and external adjustment

We examine the effects of endogenously determined oil price fluctuations in a two-country DSGE model. Under incomplete financial markets, an oil market-specific shock that boosts the oil price results in a wealth transfer toward oil exporters, depresses the oil importer's consumption, and causes the oil importer's real exchange rate to depreciate. Although the oil importer experiences a deterioration in the oil component of its trade balance, an improvement in the nonoil balance substantially dampens the effects on the overall trade balance.     

Currency mismatches and monetary policy: A tale of two equilibria

We develop a model of a small economy whose residents choose whether to borrow in domestic or foreign currency. The central bank, in turn, chooses fixed or flexible exchange rates, taking the currency denomination of debts as given. We characterize the simultaneous determination of portfolios and exchange rate regime. Both floating and fixed rates can occur as equilibrium outcomes. “Fear of floating” may emerge endogenously and in association with a currency mismatch in assets and liabilities. If equilibria with both fixed rates and floating rates coexist, the latter is Pareto superior. Lessons for current “de-dollarization” proposals are discussed.     

Capital controls on inflows, exchange rate volatility and external vulnerability

We use high frequency data and a new econometric approach to evaluate the effectiveness of controls on capital inflows. We focus on Chile's experience during the 1990s, and investigate whether controls on capital inflows reduced Chile's vulnerability to external shocks. We recognize that changes in the controls will affect the way in which different macro variables relate to each other. In particular, we consider the case where controls co-exist with an exchange rate band aimed at managing the nominal exchange rate. We develop a methodology to deal explicitly with the interaction between these two policies. The main findings may be summarized as follows: (a) a tightening of capital controls on inflows depreciates the exchange rate and (b), we find that a tightening of capital controls increases the unconditional volatility of the exchange rate, but makes it less sensitive to external shocks.     

The signaling effects associated with convertible debt design

In this paper we investigate whether the terms used in the design of a convertible debt issue act as a signal of the issuing firm's future growth prospects. Our general premise is that convertible debt design terms are interrelated and arranged in a manner that signals asymmetric information to market participants. Empirical tests support our hypothesis, even after controlling for risk, firm size, time-to-maturity, and industry effects. Firms issuing convertible debt that arrange terms to take advantage of relatively better future growth prospects are found to have a relatively lower negative price reaction around the announcement of the offer.