. 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 …

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 …

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

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

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 …

Lucas and Stokey (1983) motivated future governments to confirm an optimal tax plan by rescheduling government debt … by adding instantaneous debt to Lucas and Stokey's contractible subspace and requiring that each continuation government … preserve that debt's purchasing power instantaneously. We formulate the Ramsey problem with a Bellman equation and use it to …

- and middle-income countries. In contrast with typical sovereign debt, these lending arrangements are not public, and other … creditors have no information about their magnitude. We transform the traditional sovereign debt and default model to … quantitatively study incomplete information arrangements and find they greatly reduce traditional/Paris Club creditors' debt …

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 …

The COVID-19 epidemic in emerging markets risks a combined health, economic, and debt crisis. We integrate a standard … generate costly and prolonged debt crises. The possibility of lockdown induced debt crises in turn results in less aggressive … lockdowns and a more severe health crisis. We find that the social value of debt relief can be substantial because it can …

This Chartbook provides a pictorial history, on a country-by-country basis, of public debt and economic crises of … analysis with individual country histories, and provides the grounds for a systematic analysis of the temporal patterns of debt … cycles, banking and sovereign debt crises, hyperinflation, and, for the post World War II period, the reliance on IMF …