. The roughly $2 billion of annual debt payments to be relieved under MDRI amounts to roughly 0.01 percent of the GDP of the …The G-8 Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI) is the next step of the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative … on at least three separate occasions (1970, 1992, 2002). Second, the existence of debt overhang is a necessary condition …

Over 60% of US households with credit cards are currently borrowing -- i.e., paying interest -- on those cards. We …

restructured? This paper begins by positing a set of counterfactual conditions under which restructuring would not matter, and then … and borrowers ample reason to care whether nonperforming debts are restructured. One implication of the way in which debt … restructuring matters is that restructuring should not be too' easy. Further, with a greater frequency of defaults, some credit …

What determines the sustainability of sovereign debt? We develop a model where myopic governments seek popularity but … can nevertheless commit credibly to service external debt. They do not default when debt is low because they would lose … access to debt markets and be forced to reduce spending; they do not default as debt builds up, and net new borrowing becomes …

crises. But large debt reductions are rare. Jamaica stands out for reducing its debt from 144 percent of GDP to 72 percent …

smoothing is achieved, whether by contingent debt issuance or by contingent debt servicing, and on the exact nature of the … penalty for debt repudiation. If a sovereign that repudiated its debt could not borrow again, but could continue to save and … to dissave, then contingent debt issuance, without contingent debt servicing, cannot support a positive amount of …

We review the literature on sovereign debt. We organize our survey around three central questions: (1) Why do sovereign … debtors ever repay their debts? (2) What burdens, in the form of distortions and inefficiencies, does sovereign debt impose …? and (3) How might debt be restructured to reduce these burdens? In grappling with the first question the literature has …

a fundamental improvement in the seniority of domestic debt at the expense of foreign bank debt during the late 1980s … sources of fiscal financing influenced external debt values. The econometric analysis also implies that previous studies have … neglected an important reason for the decline in loan values from 1985 to 1989: the increase in international interest rates …

At low and moderate levels of government debt, there appears to be little relation between the level of debt and its … maturity. But at high levels of debt, a strong inverse relation emerges. We start the paper by documenting this inverse … relation for those OECD Countries which have reached very high levels of debt. We then provide a theory of the joint movements …

I develop a model in which sovereign debtors repay debt in order to maintain a reputation for repayment. Repayment … loan is profitable. Furthermore, a "debt overhang," while possibly altering credit terms, does not cause profitable …