Buybacks, Exit Bonds, and the Optimality of Debt and Liquidity Relief

We compare various forms of market-based debt relief with coordinated debt forgiveness on the part of creditors. These schemes lead to different allocations of resources and levels of debtor and creditor welfare, but all attempt to stimulate debtor investment through reductions in the level of debt. If investment-incentive effects are present, then investment in liquidity-constrained debtors will respond by enough to make a reduction in debt profitable, but not by enough to make the reduction in debt optimal. For these countries the optimal debt-relief package (from the creditors perspective) will include an infusion of new lending.

Perspectives on PPP and Long-Run Real Exchange Rates

This paper reviews the large and growing literature which tests PPP and other models of the long-run real exchange rate. We distinguish three different stages of PPP testing and focus on what has been learned from each. The most important overall lesson has been that the real exchange rate appears stationary over sufficiently long horizons. Simple, univariate random walk specifications can be rejected in favor of stationary alternatives. However, we argue that multivariate tests, which ask whether any linear combination of prices and exchange rates are stationary, have not necessarily provided meaningful rejections of nonstationarity. We also review a number of other theories of the long run real exchange rate -- including the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis -- as well as the evidence supporting them. We argue that the persistence of real exchange rate movements can be generated by a number of sensible models and that Balassa- Samuelson effects seem important, but mainly for countries with widely disparate levels of income of growth. Finally, this paper presents new evidence testing the law of one price on 200 years of historical commodity price data for England and France, and uses a century of data from Argentina to test the possibility of sample-selection bias in tests of long-run PPP.

Tests of Excess Forecast Volatility in the Foreign Exchange and Stock Markets

Simple regression tests that have power against the alternatives that. asset prices and expected future asset returns are excessively volatile are developed and performed for the foreign exchange and stock markets. These tests have a number of advantages over alternative, variance hounds techniques. We find evidence that. both exchange rates and stock prices are excessively volatile and that expected returns on foreign exchange and stocks move too much. We also investigate whether these findings ran he attributed to time-varying risk premia, but in our tests the data provide little support for such an alternative hypothesis.

The Evolving Market for Catastrophic Event Risk

This paper discusses the recent changes in the market for catastrophe risk. These risks have traditionally been distributed through the insurance and reinsurance systems. However, because insurance companies tend to share relatively small amounts of their cat exposures and because insurance companies' capital is threatened by large event, these risks are now being shared partly through the capital markets. In looking to likely future developments, the paper enumerates five key ingredients that successfully structured cat instruments are likely to share: retentions should be substantial; layers of protection should not be too high; dollar amounts of risk transfer should not be too small; loss triggers should be beyond cendent control; and loss triggers should be symmetrically transparent.

Credibility, Real Interest Rates, and the Optimal Speed of Trade Liberalization

This paper investigates the effects of imperfectly credible trade liberalization programs on welfare and the allocation of real resources. We present a rational expectations model in which a government, with limited access to international financial markets may be forced to abort a liberalization program if hard-currency reserves are depleted too quickly. The liberalization's lack of perfect credibility arts as a distortion which becomes (rationally) intensified under the typical first-best policy of a direct move to free trade. A gradual lowering of trade barriers turns out to he welfare-superior to an immediate liberalization, and to improve the chance that. the program will ultimately succeed. We then derive the optimal speed of liberalization, the intertemporal allocation of resources, and the liberalization program's credibility.