Sovereign bond issues: Do African countries pay more to borrow?☆

Do Large Employers Pay More in Developing Countries? The Case of Five African Countries

Using comparable data sets for five African countries we estimate, and evaluate possible explanations for, the employer size wage effect across these. Our results indicate, just as has been generally found for other developing and developed nations, that apart from observable worker characteristics most potential theories cannot explain very much of the wage premium received in larger firms. Mo...

Rich nations should pay more to developing countries.

The appeal to wealthy nations came a day after the Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs delivered a report to the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, entitled Investing in Development, about how to salvage efforts to achieve the millennium development goals. Interim reports published in September showed that the world will fall far short of most of the goals to reduce poverty and improve h...

Do the Poor Pay More for Food?

Low-income households may face higher food prices for three reasons: (1) on average, low-income households may spend less in supermarkets—which typically offer the lowest prices and greatest range of brands, package sizes, and quality choices; (2) low-income households are less likely to live in suburban locations where food prices are typically lower; and (3) supermarkets in low-income neighbo...

Addiction Studies in Iran Neuroscientists Need to Do More

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 ...