This paper builds a model of sovereign debt in which default risk, interest rates, and debt depend not only on current fundamentals but also on news about future fundamentals. News shocks affect equilibrium outcomes because they contain information about the future ability of the government to...

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...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the factors that contributed to the unprecedented widening of the U.S. external deficit between 1980 and 1986. The paper presents an empirical model of the U.S. current account that is used to assess the relative importance of changes in U.S. price...

This paper discusses the problems of international debt from the point of the of the evolution of U.S. policy. The first section presents a brief historical review of the international debt problems of the 1980s. The next section examines the situation as of early 1989: progress as well as...

In recent years, a number of studies have analyzed the experiences of a broad range of industrial economies during periods when their current account deficits have narrowed. Such studies identified systematic aspects of external adjustment, but it is unclear how good a guide the experience of...

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...

In 1988, the United States recorded a current account deficit of about $135 billion. The consensus forecast seems to be for little change in the current account in the near term. In this paper, the implications of the U.S. current account deficit and of the consequent buildup in U.S. external...

This paper examines several aspects of the problem of international debt that has been a feature of the world economy of the 1980s. First, the paper considers the sources or causes of these problems. It goes on to consider responses to those problems, the outlook for international lending, and...