THE CURRENCY DENOMINATION OF SOVEREIGN DEBT

This paper considers the currency composition of sovereign debt in the context of risk-sharing through excusable defaults. It is shown that monetary credibility is not a sufficient condition for borrowing in domestic currency. With real exchange rate risk, debt denominated in a borrowing country’s currency can be too state-contingent to support international lending on purely reputational considerations, even when debt denominated in the lending country’s currency is viable. The model can explain the geographical pattern of bond issuance, the phenomenon of “original sin”, and the concentration of defaults on foreign-currency debt.

The terms of trade, repudiation and default on sovereign debt

A poor country with volatile export prices borrows in international markets. When debt is denominated in foreign currency, there is a temptation to repudiate when export prices are low. Excusable partial defaults reduce this temptation, and help to support lending. The cases of debt denominated in domestic currency, and indexed to (a) consumer or (b) export prices, and (c) volatile output are also examined.

The Terms of Trade, Repudiation and Default on Sovereign Debt

A poor country with volatile export prices borrows in international markets. When debt is denominated in foreign currency, there is a temptation to repudiate when export prices are low. Excusable partial defaults reduce this temptation, and thus help to support lending.debt, default, terms of trade

FUNDAMENTALS AND EXCHANGE RATE VOLATILITY

Fundamentals may determine the range of real exchange rate fluctuation, through signals of misalignment, even if they are not a major influence on the level within that range. This can explain the puzzle that more open economies experience lower real exchange rate volatility. Adjustment of domestic prices to nominal exchange rate movements can account for only a small proportion of this effect. Sustainability analysis focuses on the ratio of the current account to GDP (rather than to total trade flows) as a misalignment signal, which implies narrower bounds for real exchange rates in more open economies.

Classifying exchange rate regimes: a statistical analysis of alternative methods

Four different schemes for classifying exchange rate regimes are compared for developing countries. Disagreements are substantial, and alternative schemes disagree as much with each other as with the official scheme. Only the official scheme shows a trend towards floating

The Performance of Exchange Rate Regimes in Developing Countries - Does the Classifications Scheme Matter?

Official and four alternative regime classification schemes based on observed exchange rate behaviour are used to examine the relationship with inflation and growth in developing countries. For an identical sample of observations from 73 countries for 1984-2001, only the scheme based on parallel rates suggests a significant effect (negative) of floating on growth. Floats that claim to be pegs, or have high exchange rate volatility, are the ones with lower growth. Hard pegs offer inflation benefits. Floating is not consistently associated with higher inflation than soft pegs, and any apparent association is a possible by-product of the design of the classification algorithms.exchange rate regimes, growth, inflation

Biogeographical Conditions, the Transition to Agriculture and Long-Run Growth

We use new data on the timing of the transition to agriculture, developed by Putterman and Trainor (2006), to test the theory of Diamond (1997) and Olsson and Hibbs (2005) that an earlier transition is reflected in higher incomes today. Our results confirm the theory, even after controlling for institutional quality and other geographical factors. The date of transition is correlated with prehistoric biogeography (the availability of wild grasses and large domesticable animal species). The factors conducive to high per capita incomes today are good institutions, an early transition to agriculture, access to the sea and a low incidence of fatal malaria. Geographical influences have been at work in all of these proximate determinants of per capita income.agriculture, geography, growth, institutions

International labour mobility and unemployment

We develop a two-country labour-market model characterised by union wage-bargaining, in which the unemployed incur individual-specific costs of seeking work abroad. We explore the effects on equilibrium unemployment in each country of changes in union bargaining strength, the ratio of unemployment benefits to wages, and employers' willingness to hire foreign workers. Unfavourable labour-market institutions increase unemployment abroad as well as at home. We find that no country has an incentive to internationalise its own labour market unilaterally, because all the employment gains spill over abroad, which gives countries a strong incentive to co-ordinate on internationalisation.international labour mobility, unions, wage bargaining, globalization, unemployment

Exchange Rate Regimes and Inflation Persistence

Some empirical research has suggested that inflation is more persistent under floating exchange rates. Theoretically, we should expect a higher variance of inflation persistence across countries under floating rates, but not necessarily a higher mean. It is shown that estimates of inflation persistence are biased upwards by underfitting mean shifts in the sample. After correction for mean shifts, there is evidence of greater inflation persistence in the post-Bretton Woods period, but no evidence of variation across exchange rate regimes. Monetary growth has been much less accommodative of inflation since 1979, with no difference between EMS and non-EMS countries. Copyright 2001, International Monetary Fund

In What Sense Can Intervention Reduce Exchange Rate Volatility?

Can pegging reduce real as well as nominal, and multilateral as well as bilateral exchange rate volatility? We investigate this issue using monthly data for 139 countries from January 1990 to June 2006. We use the IMF regime classification system, because this closely reflects the form of governments’ exchange rate commitments. We find that both nominal and real volatility against the anchor currency increase steadily with regime flexibility. Real bilateral volatility against non-anchor currencies and real effective exchange rate volatility are significantly higher under independent floats, but are otherwise insensitive to the exchange rate regime.Exchange rate regimes, inflation, volatility.