Are lending contracts between international financial institutions (IFIs) and sovereign borrowers optimal? To address this question this paper builds on two ideas. First, the prospect of future debt relief can make it profitable for an IFI to continue lending even if lending contracts are...

We develop a model of a small open economy with three types of nominal rigidities (domestic goods prices, imported goods prices and wages) and eight different structural shocks. We estimate the model's structural parameters using a maximum likelihood procedure and use it to compute...

The importance of currency and maturity mismatches in the debt structure of emerging markets is an issue that can hardly be overemphasized. Yet, while many papers have explained how imbalances in the asset and liability structure of emerging markets can cause currency and financial crises, the...