Russia's foreign debt problems worsened substantially after the financial crisis of 1998. The paper focuses on the key role of the government in servicing foreign debt and promoting institution building by showing how foreign debt influences the choice between official and unofficial taxation....

How costly are sovereign debt crises? In this paper we study output losses during sovereign default and debt renegotiation episodes since 1980. In contrast to previous work, we account for the severity of default and not only for its occurrence. Specifically, we distinguish between "hard" and...

Russia's foreign debt problems worsened substantially after the financial crisis of 1998. The paper focuses on the key role of the government in servicing foreign debt and promoting institution building by showing how foreign debt influences the choice between official and unofficial taxation....

Sovereign debt restructurings can be implemented preemptively - prior to a payment default. We code a comprehensive new dataset and find that preemptive restructurings (i) are frequent (38% of all deals 1978-2010), (ii) have lower haircuts, (iii) are quicker to negotiate, and (iv) see lower...

Sovereign debt restructurings can be implemented preemptively - prior to a payment default. We code a comprehensive new dataset and find that preemptive restructurings (i) are frequent (38% of all deals 1978-2010), (ii) have lower haircuts, (iii) are quicker to negotiate, and (iv) see lower...

This paper analyses the history and effectiveness of the two major mechanisms of resolution of balance of payments crisis. It argues that IMF lending has met its counter-cyclical objectives through history and has been improving in terms of providing adequate lending facilities as well as...

We analyze the effects of government spending in a New-Keynesian model with search and matching frictions featuring endogenous growth through learning-by-doing and skill loss from long-term unemployment. We show that medium-run and long-run output and unemployment multipliers are much larger...