This paper examines the determinants of"debt distress,"which they define as periods in which countries resort to exceptional finance in any of three forms: (1) significant arrears on external debt, (2) Paris Club rescheduling, and (3) nonconcessional International Monetary Fund lending. Using...

What incentives do countries have to repay loans? Do banks credibly punish borrowers that behave badly - and if so, how? Two explanations are commonly offered for why countries repay debts: (a) to preserve their reputation as a good borrower; or (b) to avoid direct sanctions, such as trade...

When sovereign debt trades at a discount on secondary markets, a market buyback increases the secondary market price. The wealth of private creditors increases because part of the funds used in the repurchase is a transfer payment to them. This transfer of resources can be mitigated by imposing...

The debt crisis of the 1930's illustrated the difficulty of global plans for resolving the debt crisis and underscored the importance of market-based debt-reduction schemes. The crisis of the 1980's differed in fundamental ways from that of the 1930's, but the earlier crisis illuminated the...

The causes and implications of the developing country debt crisis - as well as its solution - all have an important fiscal dimension. The crisis was triggered by the widespread perception that the public sectors in many heavily indebted countries were effectively insolvent in the international...

This paper models a dynamic bargaining game between a highly indebted country and its commercial bank consortium, to analyze the determinants of the resulting re-scheduling agreements and the net transfer of resources over time. The bargaining game is based on the simple paradigm that if no...

A large gap may lie between the amount of debt relief that is nominally granted to a debtor and that which is actually given up by the creditors. To help put that gap in perspective, the author proposes a valuation formula that provides: (i) the price at which a buy-back of the debt, on the...

Uganda's commercial debt buy-back operation was financed by the International Development Association's Debt Reduction Facility (IDA Facility), with cofinancing from the governments of Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland and the European Union. Commercial debt service is a serious burden...

This paper presents a pricing model for secondary market debt designed to assess the market value of various forms of guarantees and the impact of debt reduction on the value of remaining claims. The model is more flexible and realistic than other models. The technique used, option pricing,...

The idea of debt conversion is that instead of continuing to make payments on outstanding loans in hard currency in the face of debt servicing difficulties, the debtors find some other way to settle debts that is satisfactory to themselves and the creditor. The author discusses the importance of...