This paper considers the market for private guarantees for municipal debt. It reviews the empirical evidence on the effects of insurance upon the pricing of new is.sues. It also presents the first empirical evidence available on the effects of bond insurance in the aftermarket for tax exempt securities. Aftermarket trades in identical securities in insured and uninsured forms are used to estima...

We use the August 2007 crisis episode to gauge the causal effect of financial contracting on real firm behavior. We identify heterogeneity in financial contracting at the onset of the crisis by exploiting ex-ante variation in long-term debt maturity structure. Using a difference-in-differences matching estimator approach, we find that firms whose long-term debt was largely maturing right after ...

The Greek restructuring of March 2012 illustrates how non-price contract terms can have a significant effect on the pricing of sovereign debt. In the Greek restructuring, bonds governed by local law suffered NPV haircuts in the range of 60-75%, whereas those bonds governed by foreign law were paid in full and on time. Other contract parameters such as the currency in which the debt is denominat...

We examine in a Cournot duopoly model the well known view that short-term capital market debt can control managerial moral hazard. We show that short-term debt does not provide this discipline because of management’s manipulation of the information flow to the market. Shareholders may nevertheless prefer short-term debt because it motivates management to be more aggressive in the product market...

Debt-financed fiscal stimulus programmes directly stimulate aggregate demand through government expenditure or tax cuts, but their effectiveness is highly dependent on direct crowding out of private sector expenditure, spillover effects to the a higher risk premium interest rates, and interaction between policy monetary policy. Using an open-economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model,...

Nominal government debt, including the monetary base, is a residual claim to government surpluses. Thus, the value of Þat money can be determined in a completely frictionless economy, just like the price of stock. The main theoretical objection to this Þscal theory of the price level is that it mistreats the government’s intertemporal budget constraint. I show that the valuation equation for no...

We empirically examine financial institutions’ motivations to take systematic bad-tail risk in the form of sponsorship of credit-arbitrage asset-backed commercial paper vehicles. A run on debt issued by such vehicles played a key role in causing and propagating the liquidity crisis that began in the summer of 2007. We find evidence consistent with important roles for both ownermanager agency pr...

The stock of sovereign debt is typically measured at face value. Defined as the undiscounted sum of future principal repayments, face values are misleading when debts are issued with different contractual forms or maturities. In this paper, we construct alternative measures of the stock of external sovereign debt for 100 developing countries from 1979 through 2006 that correct for differences i...