2,155 research outputs found
The Problem of Holdout Creditors in Eurozone Sovereign Debt Restructuring
The Eurozone official sector has declared that the belated restructuring of Greek bonds held by private sector creditors in 2012 was a “unique and exceptional” event, never, ever to be repeated in any other Eurozone country. Maybe so. But if this assurance proves in time to be as fragile as the official sector’s prior pronouncements on the subject of “private sector involvement” in Eurozone sovereign debt problems, any future Eurozone debt restructuring will be surely plagued by the problem of non-participating creditors --- holdouts. Indeed, it is the undisguised fear of holdouts and the prospect of a messy, Argentine-style debt restructuring in the belly of Europe that has been one of the principal motivations for the official sector’s willingness to use its taxpayer money to repay, in full and on time, all of the private sector creditors of Eurozone countries receiving bailouts (the belated Greek restructuring being the sole exception).
This article argues that a simple amendment of the Treaty Establishing the European Stability Mechanism (the Eurozone’s new bailout facility) could immunize within the confines of the Eurozone the assets of a Eurozone country receiving ESM bailout assistance from attachment by litigious holdout creditors. By thus increasing the difficulties that holdouts would face in enforcing court judgments against a debtor country, the objective of the amendment is to deflate creditor expectations that staying out of an ESM-supported sovereign debt restructuring will lead to a preferential recovery for the holdouts.
This measure would also, when taken together with the other steps that the Eurozone has already implemented, substantially replicate the important features of the Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism proposed by the IMF in 2002
Reprofiling Sovereign Debt
• The IMF staff’s 2013 proposal to reprofile (i.e., stretch out for a short period without haircutting principal or interest) the maturing debt of a country that has lost market access is a sensible policy in cases where the IMF is uncertain whether the country’s debt stock is sustainable.
• The motivation for the policy is to avoid situations, such as occurred during the Eurozone debt crisis, in which Fund resources are used to bail-out commercial creditors in full.
• But a debt reprofiling is a species of debt restructuring and as such is susceptible to holdout creditor behaviour.
• By allowing a small portion of its loans to the debtor country to be used to neutralise some or all of the additional credit risk caused by the reprofiling, the IMF could minimise holdout creditors in these operations.
• The authors propose a technique for minimizing the risk that certain creditors may elect to decline a reprofiling proposal, no matter how lenient its terms
GRB000301C with peculiar afterglow emission
The CCD magnitudes in Johnson V and Cousins R and I photometric passbands are
determined for GRB 000301C afterglow starting ~ 1.5 day after the gamma-ray
burst. In fact we provide the earliest optical observations for this burst.
Light curves of the afterglow emissions in U, B, V, R, I, J and K' passbands
are obtained by combining the present measurements with the published data.
Flux decay shows a very uncommon variation relative to other well observed
GRBs. Overall, there is a steepening of the optical and near-infrared flux
decay caused by a geometric and sideways expanding jet. This is superimposed by
a short term variability especially during early time (Delta t < 8 days). The
cause of variability is not well understood, though it has occurred
simultaneously with similar amplitude in all the filters. We derive the early
and late time flux decay constants using jet model. The late time flux decay is
the steepest amongst the GRB OTs observed so far with alpha ~ 3. Steepening in
the flux decay seems to have started simultaneously around Delta t ~ 7.6 day in
all passbands. The value of spectral index in the optical-near IR region is ~
-1.0. Redshift determination with z=2.0335 indicates cosmological origin of the
GRB having a luminosity distance of 16.6 Gpc. Thus it becomes the second
farthest amongst the GRBs with known distances. An indirect estimate of the
fluence > 20 keV indicates, if isotropic,> =10^53 ergs of release of energy.
The enormous amount of released energy will be reduced, if the radiation is
beamed which is the case for this event. Using a jet break time of 7.6 days, we
infer a jet opening angle of ~ 0.15 radian. This means the energy released is
reduced by a factor of ~ 90 relative to the isotropic value.Comment: LaTeX file, 11 pages including 4 figures, uses psfig.sty, Bull.
Astron. Society of India(accepted, Sept, 2000 issue
Percepciones de los ciudadanos catalanes acerca de la participación del público y los expertos en las controversias sobre el agua
La gestión sostenible del agua ha aparecido en España como el centro de una controversia de primera magnitud. En ella, la participación ciudadana es un eje fundamental. A partir del análisis de grupos de discusión realizados en seis ciudades de Cataluña, este trabajo reflexiona sobre la percepción de la participación en los debates sobre el agua. Se presentan cinco actores que aparecen en el discurso de los entrevistados: los «expertos», los «perjudicados », los «beneficiados», los «interesados» y los «concienciados». Posteriormente, se examinan los criterios que permiten identificar, entre estos actores, los que son considerados legítimos en las controversias hidrológicas.Sustainable water management has become the focal point of a highly important issue in Spain. Citizens’ participation in this controversy it is fundamental. Having carried out the analysis of several focus groups in six Catalonian cities (Spain), this study reflects on the perception of participating in discussions on water. Five actors mentioned in interviewees’ discourse are presented: the «experts», the «affected», the «benefited», the «interested», and the «conscious». Then, the criteria permitting to identify among these actors those considered to be legitimate participants in hydrological controversies are examined
Optical afterglow of the not so dark GRB 021211
We determine Johnson and Cousins photometric CCD magnitudes for
the afterglow of GRB 021211 during the first night after the GRB trigger. The
afterglow was very faint and would have been probably missed if no prompt
observation had been conducted. A fraction of the so-called ``dark'' GRBs may
thus be just ``optically dim'' and require very deep imaging to be detected.
The early-time optical light curve reported by other observers shows prompt
emission with properties similar to that of GRB 990123. Following this, the
afterglow emission from min to days after the burst is
characterized by an overall power-law decay with a slope in the
passband. We derive the value of spectral index in the optical to near-IR
region to be 0.60.2 during 0.13 to 0.8 day after the burst. The flux decay
constant and the spectral slope indicate that optical observations within a day
after the burst lies between cooling frequency and synchrotron maximum
frequency.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, A&A Letters, 408, L2
Optical observations of the bright long duration peculiar GRB 021004 afterglow
The CCD magnitudes in Johnson and Cousins and photometric
passbands are determined for the bright long duration GRB 021004 afterglow from
2002 October 4 to 16 starting 3 hours after the ray burst.
Light curves of the afterglow emission in ,, and passbands are
obtained by combining these measurements with other published data. The
earliest optical emission appears to originate in a revese shock. Flux decay of
the afterglow shows a very uncommon variation relative to other well-observed
GRBs. Rapid light variations, especially during early times (
days) is superposed on an underlying broken power law decay typical of a jetted
afterglow. The flux decay constants at early and late times derived from least
square fits to the light curve are and respectively,
with a jet break at around 7 day. Comparison with a standard fireball model
indicates a total extinction of mag in the direction of the
burst. Our low-resolution spectra corrected for this extinction provide a
spectral slope . This value and the flux decay constants
agree well with the electron energy index used in the model. The
derived jet opening angle of about implies a total emitted
gamma-ray energy erg at a cosmological distance
of about 20 Gpc. Multiwavelength observations indicate association of this GRB
with a star forming region, supporting the case for collapsar origin of long
duration GRBs.Comment: 19 pages, 3 figures, BASI, 31, 1
BATSE Soft Gamma-Ray Observations of GROJ0422+32
We report results of a comprehensive study of the soft gamma-ray (30 keV to
1.7 MeV) emission of GROJ0422+32 during its first known outburst in 1992. These
results were derived from the BATSE earth-occultation database with the JPL
data analysis package, EBOP (Enhanced BATSE Occultation Package). Results
presented here focus primarily on the long-term temporal and spectral
variability of the source emission associated with the outburst. The light
curves with 1-day resolution in six broad energy-bands show the high-energy
flux (>200 keV) led the low-energy flux (<200 keV) by ~5 days in reaching the
primary peak, but lagged the latter by ~7 days in starting the declining phase.
We confirm the "secondary maximum" of the low-energy (<200 keV) flux at TJD
8970-8981, ~120 days after the first maximum. Our data show that the "secondary
maximum" was also prominent in the 200-300 keV band, but became less pronounced
at higher energies. During this 200-day period, the spectrum evolved from a
power-law with photon index of 1.75 on TJD 8839, to a shape that can be
described by a Comptonized model or an exponential power law below 300 keV,
with a variable power-law tail above 300 keV. The spectrum remained roughly in
this two-component shape until ~9 November (TJD 8935) and then returned to the
initial power-law shape with an index of ~2 until the end of the period. The
correlation of the two spectral shapes with the high and low luminosities of
the soft gamma-ray emission is strongly reminiscent of that seen in Cygnus X-1.
We interpret these results in terms of the Advection Dominated Accretion Flow
(ADAF) model with possibly a "jet-like" region that persistently produced the
non-thermal power-law gamma rays observed throughout the event.Comment: 40 pages total, including 10 figures and 2 table
Searching for galactic sources in the Swift GRB catalog
Since the early 1990s Gamma Ray Bursts have been accepted to be of
extra-galactic origin due to the isotropic distribution observed by BATSE and
the redshifts observed via absorption line spectroscopy. Nevertheless, upon
further examination at least one case turned out to be of galactic origin. This
particular event presented a Fast Rise, Exponential Decay (FRED) structure
which leads us to believe that other FRED sources might also be Galactic. This
study was set out to estimate the most probable degree of contamination by
galactic sources that certain samples of FREDs have. In order to quantify the
degree of anisotropy the average dipolar and quadripolar moments of each sample
of GRBs with respect to the galactic plane were calculated. This was then
compared to the probability distribution of simulated samples comprised of a
combination of isotropically generated sources and galactic sources. We observe
that the dipolar and quadripolar moments of the selected subsamples of FREDs
are found more than two standard deviations outside those of random
isotropically generated samples.The most probable degree of contamination by
galactic sources for the FRED GRBs of the Swift catalog detected until February
2011 that do not have a known redshift is about 21 out of 77 sources which is
roughly equal to 27%. Furthermore we observe, that by removing from this sample
those bursts that may have any type of indirect redshift indicator and multiple
peaks gives the most probable contamination increases up to 34% (17 out of 49
sources). It is probable that a high degree of contamination by galactic
sources occurs among the single peak FREDs observed by Swift.Comment: Published to A&A, 4 pages, 5 figures, this arXiv version includes
appended table with all the bursts considered in this stud
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