Bankruptcy Proceedings for Sovereign State Insolvency

sovereign debt, bankruptcy, capital flows, Chapter 11

Default Costs, Willingness to Pay and Sovereign Debt Buybacks

The arguments put forward by Bulow and Rogoff (1988, 1991) against sovereign debt buybacks are re-examined in a willingness-to-pay framework. This paper argues that the Bulow-Rogoff framework treats default by a debtor as an event with no dead-weight loss, and, as such, underestimates the potential gains from a buyback. The willingness-to- pay framework allows dead-weight costs of default to be introduced in a consistent and simple fashion into the buybacks calculus. Two versions of this framework are considered. First, a model in which the default costs induce an all-or-nothing default decision is analysed. In this case, an ambiguous result is derived in which the variability of the debtor’s income determines whether (small) buybacks are beneficial to the debtor, even though expected total transfers to the creditor increase, consistent with Bulow-Rogoff. In a second version, default costs are modelled so as to induce at most a partial default. This model corresponds most closely, in terms of the repayment behaviour of the sovereign debtor, to the models used by Bulow and Rogoff. It is shown that small buybacks are always beneficial to the debtor in this case. The second version is extended to include an investment opportunity. Only if the country has sufficiently scarce resources when the investment can be made, will a buyback be harmful to the interests of the debtor.Sovereign Debt Buybacks Sanctions Willingness to Pay

Fair pay and a Wagebill Argument for Wage Rigidity and Excessive Employment Variability

This paper considers a two-period optimal contracting model in which firms make new hires in the second period subject to the constraint that they cannot pay discriminate either against or in favour of the new hires. Under an assumption on the information available to workers, it is shown that wages are less flexible than needed for efficient employment levels, with the result that too few hires are made in bad states of the world. Unemployment is involuntary. In an extension to the model, there may also be involuntary and excessive layoffs in some states of the world.implicit contract theory, wage rigidity, involuntary unemployment

Bankruptcy Proceedings for Sovereign State Insolvency and their Effect on Capital Flows

sovereign debt, bankruptcy, capital flows, Chapter 11

Some Asymptotic Results in Discounted Repeated Games of One-Sided Incomplete Information

The paper analyzes the Nash equilibria of two-person discounted repeated games with one-sided incomplete information and known own payoffs. If the informed player is arbitrarily patient relative to the uninformed player, then the characterization for the informed player's payoffs is essentially the same as that in the undiscounted case. This implies that even small amounts of incomplete information can lead to a discontinuous change in the equilibrium payoff set. For the case of equal discount factors, however, and under an assumption that strictly individually rational payoffs exist, a result akin to the Folk Theorem holds when a complete information game is perturbed by a small amount of incomplete information.reputation, Folk Theorem, repeated games, incomplete information

Unemployment Insurance under Moral Hazard and Limited Commitment: Public vs Private Provision

This paper analyses a model of private unemployment insurance under limited commitment and a model of public unemployment insurance subject to moral hazard in an economy with a continuum of agents and an infinite time horizon. The dynamic and steady-state properties of the private unemployment insurance scheme are established. The interaction between the public and private unemployment insurance schemes is examined. Examples are constructed to show that for some parameter values increased public insurance can reduce welfare by crowding out private insurance more than one-to-one and that for other parameter values a mix of both public and private insurance can be welfare maximising.Social Insurance, Moral Hazard, Limited Commitment, Unemployment Insurance, Crowding Out

Gift-giving, Quasi-Credit and Reciprocity

The fluctuations in incomes inherent in rural communities can be attenuated by reciprocal assistance. A model of reciprocal assistance based upon rational action and voluntary participation is presented. Individuals provide assistance only if the costs of so doing are outweighed by the benefits from expected future reciprocation. A distinction is made between general reciprocity where the counter obligation is expected but not certain and balanced reciprocity where there is a firm counter obligation. This firm counter obligation is reflected by including a loan or quasi-credit element in any assistance. It is shown how this can increase the assistance given and it may explain the widespread use of quasi-credit in rural comunitities. Moreover it is shown that for a range of parameter values consistent with evidence from three villages in southern India, a simple scheme of gift-giving and quasi-credit can do almost as well as theoretically better but more complicated schemes.implicit contract, gift giving, reciprocity, quasi-credit

Minu, Startu and All That: Pitfalls in Estimating the Sensitivity of a Worker's Wage to Aggregate Unemployment

In this paper we show that panel estimates of tenure specific sensitivity to the business cycle of wages is subject to serious pitfalls. Three canonical variates used in the literature â the minimum unemployment rate during a workerâs time at the firm (min u), the unemployment rate at the start of her tenure (Su) and the current unemployment rate interacted with a new hire dummy (δu) â can all be significant and "correctly" signed even when each worker in the firm receives the same wage, regardless of tenure (equal treatment). In matched data the problem can be resolved by the inclusion in the panel of firm-year interaction dummies. In unmatched data where this is not possible, we propose a solution for min u and Su based on Solon, Barsky and Parker's (1994) two step method. Our proposed solution method is however suboptimal because it removes a lot of potentially informative variation in average wages. Unfortunately δu cannot be identified in unmatched data because a differential wage response to unemployment of new hires and incumbents will appear under both equal treatment and unequal treatment.wage cyclicality, unemployment

Measuring What Employers Really Do about Entry Wages over the Business Cycle

In models recently published by several influential macroeconomic theorists, rigidity in the real wages that firms pay newly hired workers plays a crucial role in generating realistically large cyclical fluctuations in unemployment. There is remarkably little evidence, however, on whether employers' hiring wages really are invariant to business cycle conditions. We review the small empirical literature and show that the methods used thus far are poorly suited for identifying employers’ wage practices. We propose a simpler and more relevant approach – use matched employer/employee longitudinal data to identify entry jobs and then directly track the cyclical variation in the real wages paid to workers newly hired into those jobs. We illustrate the methodology by applying it to data from an annual census of employers in Portugal over the period 1982-2007. We find that real entry wages in Portugal over this period tend to be about 1.8 percent higher when the unemployment rate is one percentage point lower. Like most recent evidence on other aspects of wage cyclicality, our results suggest that the cyclical elasticity of wages is similar to that of employment.real wage cyclicality, entry wages, matched employer-employee data