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The IMF in a World of Private Capital Markets
The IMF attempts to catalyze and stabilize private capital flows to emerging markets by providing public monitoring and emergency finance. In analyzing its role we contrast cases where banks and bondholders do the lending. Banks have a natural advantage in monitoring and creditor coordination, while bonds have superior risk sharing characteristics. Consistent with this assumption, banks reduce spreads as they obtain more information through repeat transactions with borrowers. By comparison, repeat borrowing has little influence in bond markets, where publicly available information dominates. But spreads on bonds are lower when they are issued in conjunction with IMF-supported programs, as if the existence of a program conveyed positive information to bondholders. The influence of IMF monitoring in bond markets is especially pronounced for countries vulnerable to liquidity crises.
Inefficient Private Renegotiation of Sovereign Debt
Private renegotiation of debt repayments and new loans is inefficient because of the creditors' seniority privileges and lack of commitment and the inadequate information creditors have about debtors' policy choices.
Crisis Resolution
At the April 2003 meeting of the International Monetary and Financial Committees, it was decided to further encourage the contractual approach to smoothing the process of sovereign debt restructuring by encouraging the more widespread use of collective action clauses (CACs) in international bonds. This decision was shaped partly by Mexico's successful launch of a bond subject to New York law but featuring CACs, and by subsequent issues with similar provisions from other emerging market countries. This paper reviews the developments leading up to that event, its implications, and prospects for the future. It asks whether we can expect to see additional issuance by emerging markets of bonds featuring CACs, whether such a trend would in fact help to make the world a safer financial place, and what additional steps might be taken to further enhance modalities for crisis resolution.
Sovereign Bond Restructuring
This paper compares the restructuring of sovereign bonds with and without collective action clauses. One conclusion is that collective action clauses can allow efficient debt renegotiation in a formal model of sovereign debt renegotiation while unanimity rules offer incentives for opportunistic behavior by bondholders that leads to inefficient outcomes. With collective action clauses, the mutual gains from renegotiation can be internalized by bondholders so that the holders of each bond issue have incentives to participate in a collective debt restructuring. The analysis abstracts from transactions costs, and the last conclusion might well be sensitive to renegotiation and coordination costs.
Recent Private Capital Inflows to Developing Countries
This empirical study finds that while debt reduction and policy reforms in debtor countries have been important determinants of renewed access to international capital markets, changes in international interest rates have been the dominant factor. We calculate the effects of changes in international interest rates for a 'typical' debtor country. We conclude that increases in interest rates associated with business cycle upturn in industrial countries could depress the secondary market prices of existing debt to levels inconsistent with continued capital inflows.
Voluntary Choices in Concerted Deals
When lenders participate voluntarily in a buyback of debt claims, both the price paid for repurchased claims and the secondary market price of the remaining debt rise-- so all creditors realize a net benefit. In contrast, the menu approach to debt reduction allows the debtor to reduce its debt at cheaper prices.
On Noncooperative Capital Income Taxation in Open Economies
This paper discusses the strategic use of capital income taxation and lump-sum fiscal policies for gaining national advantage in an integrated world capital market. Each fiscal authority seeks to maximize a social welfare function defined over the utilities of home country residents incorporating national redistributing objectives. A national optimum policy is to impose a non-discriminatory source-based capital income tax or subsidy along with an optimal lump-sum tax and transfer plan. Residence-based capital income taxes do not augment the set of lump-sum fiscal instruments, although both policies can be used to influence the world interest rate to national advantage, redistributing welfare internationally. When unrestricted lump-sum fiscal policies are unavailable, source-based capital income taxes may be needed to achieve distributional objectives, so that departures from global production efficiency can arise in a cooperative equilibrium.
The Welfare Economics of Cooperative and Non-cooperative Fiscal Policy
In a competitive two-country overlapping generations model with perfect capital mobility, a plan that is individually Pareto optimal (that is Pareto optimal with respect to individual preferences) can be sustained without coordination of national fiscal policies when the fiscal arsenal is restricted to lump-sum taxes and government borrowing. Cooperation is required to achieve a Pareto optimum with respect to the two utilitarian national social welfare functions. Cooperation and international side payments are required to achieve an optimum with respect to a utilitarian global social welfare function. Without international lump-sum transfers, when distortionary taxes on capital income are permitted, Pareto optima with respect to national social welfare functions and global social welfare optima will not be individual Pareto optima: efficiency is traded off for a more desirable intergenerational and international distribution of resources. With nationally provided international public goods, the achievement of individual Pareto efficiency requires coordination of public spending but not of financing.
The Role of Credit Markets in a Transition Economy with Incomplete Public Information
In this paper we explore some of the informational problems that constrain the development of credit markets in transition economies. We characterize investment patterns under uncertainty and high costs of entry, when agents learn about the ultimate value of enterprises through production in a Bayesian way. Inefficiencies due to the lack of public information reduce the average return to capital. Under asymmetric information, credit would go to activities that can provide enough co-finance. Credit markets may fail to develop for a while if there is not enough individual wealth to complement credit. Once they operate, credit markets may magnify distortions in equity markets, such as those due to spontaneous privatization. An argument for the sequencing of capital market liberalization is provided.
Permanent International Productivity Growth Differentials in an Integrated Global Economy
The paper analyzes the role of differences in household behavior as a source of persistent and even permanent differences between national or regional productivity growth rates, when there are constant static returns to scale in production and costless international diffusion of technology. A binding self-financing constraint on human capital formation can account for permanent international productivity growth differentials. An alternative mechanism is the nontradedness of an essential input, such as human capital, in the growth process. Differences in national policies toward private saving (whether through lump-sum intergenerational redistribution or through the taxation of financial asset income), toward the subsidization of human capital formation (student loans) and toward the free provision of public sector inputs in the human capital formation process also influence the long-run growth differentials.
