This paper surveys the literature on external debt which has developed over the past decade. Initially this literature emphasized the intertemporal nature of the balance of payments, and reflected the view that balance of payments movements were an equilibrium phenomenon reflecting either...

It has been recognized that the optimal strategy of a government is generally time-inconsistent: optimality requires that the government take into account expectations effects in the formulation of its policy and to ignore these effects when applying the policy. In order to analyse the problem,...

If interest rates (country spreads) rise, debt can rapidly be subject to a snowball effect, which then becomes self-fulfilling with regard to the fundamentals themselves. This is a market imperfection, because we cannot be confident that the unaided market will choose the ‘good equilibrium’...

This paper investigates theoretically and empirically the effect on exchange rates of integrating monetary policy in Europe. It shows that the likely effect will be to generate a tighter European monetary policy (notwithstanding credibility aspects which are not discussed). The argument is that...

We study the behaviour of secondary market prices for the debt of seven LDCs for the period March 1986 through November 1989 (monthly data). These prices for long-term debt appear to be driven by a set of `common factors' across countries. One of these is the interest rate, Libor; we found a...

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...