Since the beginning of the developing-country debt crisi in mid-1982, economists have puzzled iver its origins. Why did market forces not dater creditors from lending and debtors from borrowing so very much more than could, in retrospect, be repaid? Moreover, once the crisis was under way, why...

The present study departs from the conventional approach to world capital-market imperfections by relying on the notion of individual risk, rather than country risk. This difference of emphasis has important implications for the specification of intertemporal optimizing models of small indebted...