Are lending contracts between international financial institutions (IFIs) and sovereign borrowers optimal? To address this question this paper builds on two ideas. First, the prospect of future debt relief can make it profitable for an IFI to continue lending even if lending contracts are...

International Monetary Fund lending continues to be criticized for possibly generating moral hazard in international financial markets. The empirical examination of this issue has focused exclusively on the potential distortions in the pricing of credit, in the form of lower spreads. To date no...

In recent years, the International Monetary Fund has seen a spate of critical analyses of its lending activities. It has even been suggested that politics influences the allocation of IMF lending with powerful industrialized countries being able to use Fund lending to further their own...

The political factors, which shape IMF lending to LDCs, have attracted much attention. The same goes for the role and influence of the US. However, formal modelling is scant. In this paper, we assume that the US is principal within the IMF and seeks to maximize its impact on the policy stance of...

Are lending contracts between international financial institutions (IFIs) and sovereign borrowers optimal? To address this question this paper builds on two ideas. First, the prospect of future debt relief can make it profitable for an IFI to continue lending even if lending contracts are...

In the wake of the global crisis the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has increased its exposure to developing countries and modified its lending approach to enhance its crisis prevention role. In this paper we examine whether, during the current crisis, IMF lending was actually directed at...

This paper looks at the effects of International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending programs on banking crises in a large sample of developing countries, over the period 1970-2010. The endogeneity of the IMF intervention is addressed by adopting an instrumental variable strategy and a propensity score...