Why do countries default? This seemingly simple question has yet to be adequately answered in the literature. Indeed, prevailing modelling strategies compel the to choose between two unappealing model features: depending on the cost of default selected by the modeler, either the debt ratios are...

The paper compiles a new data base, based on the earlier work by Kray and Nehu, to assess the determinants of sovereign debt crises over the last forty years. A simple statistical analysis of the cause of the crises is performed. It shows that neither the serial defaulter nor the "global crisis"...

We distinguish two types of debt crises: those that are the outcome of exogenous shocks (to productivity growth for instance) and those that are endogenously created, either by self-fulfilling panic in financial markets or by the reckless behavior of "Panglossian" borrowers. After Krugman, we...

During the XXth century, life expectancy levels have converged across the world. Yet, macroeconomic studies, as Acemoglu and Johnson (2007), estimate that improvements in health have no impact on growth or any factors of growth; in particular, they find no impact of life expectancy increases on...

This paper aims to disentangle the correlation between LDC debt and growth in the 1980s. We show that large debt was not an unconditional predictor of slow growth in the eighties and that investment was not abnormally low, when compared with a `financial autarky' rate, calculated in the text. We...

The paper computes lifetime welfare functions for French and American workers. For the vast majority of workers, we find that the lifetime discrepancy between the welfare of an employed and that of an unemplyed worker appear to quite similar in the two countries, corresponding to nine monthly...

We analyse the buy-back of its debt by an LDC. Contrary to the analyses that were previously done on this subject, we assume that the debtor can hide its transactions behind the veil of a fictitious operator: the banks, we assume, cannot discriminate intra-bank transactions from buy-backs by the...

This paper gives a valuation formula for LDC debt that is used to assess: i) the price at which a buy-back of the debt is advantageous to the country (we shall see that it is likely to be half the observed market price); ii) the value to the creditors of having the flows of payment guaranteed...

This paper sets a framework for analysing how memoryless voters may come to elect and re-elect a committed policy-maker. Policy-makers, we assume, are trusted to implement the policy that they announce ex ante (and do implement it, if elected and re-elected). Voters, however, are never bound by...

This paper applies the methodology and the empirical results derived from the `endogenous growth literature' to the East European countries. From that baseline, we analyse the solvency of Eastern Europe by calculating a `growth-adjusted-debt-per-effective-capita' measure of the burden of debt in...