and borrowers ample reason to care whether nonperforming debts are restructured. One implication of the way in which debt …What difference does it make, and for whom, whether the nonperforming debts of emerging market borrowers are … restructured? This paper begins by positing a set of counterfactual conditions under which restructuring would not matter, and then …

debtors ever repay their debts? (2) What burdens, in the form of distortions and inefficiencies, does sovereign debt impose … economy. Answers to the third question include measures by creditors, by debtors, and by public institutions to reduce debt …We review the literature on sovereign debt. We organize our survey around three central questions: (1) Why do sovereign …

creditors. This paper emphasizes the crucial distinction between marginal and average sovereign debt. This distinction provides …The most widely proposed LDC debt plans are flawed by their failure to recognize the fundamental differences between … corporate and sovereign debt. Consequently, many plans intended to help highly-indebted countries mainly aid their foreign …

bonds. Our main finding is that when reduction of debt is optimal, the sovereign should remain passive in the long-term bond … these bonds. The only active margin is the short-term bond market, which involves partial roll over of such debt. Any active … deleveraging process. We also show that there exist a set of Pareto improving debt restructurings in which maturities are shortened …

inefficiency requires a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism that fulfills some of the functions of corporate bankruptcy regimes … repayment by making their claims more difficult to restructure. We show within a simple model how competition for repayment … between lenders may result in sovereign debt that is excessively difficult to restructure in equilibrium. Alleviating this …

repayment as well as future debt issuances. Our main finding is that under a wide range of conditions the sovereign should, as …We study the interactions between sovereign debt default and maturity choice in a setting with limited commitment for … long as default is not preferable, remain passive in long-term bond markets, making payments and retiring long-term bonds …

. 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 …

We introduce a novel survey measure of attitude toward debt. Matching our survey results with panel data on Swedish … household balance sheets from registry data, we show that our debt attitude measure helps explain individual variation in … indebtedness as well as debt build-up and consumption behavior in the period 2004-2007. As an explanatory variable, debt attitude …

Reducing high public debts is key for countries seeking to restore fiscal capacity and resilience in the wake of recent … crises. But large debt reductions are rare. Jamaica stands out for reducing its debt from 144 percent of GDP to 72 percent …