We develop a political-economic model of sovereign debt that shows that income inequality leads to popular pressures on the government to use foreign debt to Þnance a redistribution of income at the expense of productive public investment. Recognizing this fact international lenders impose credit ceilings with the consequence that developing country borrowers invest less and grow slower. ∗We ar...

The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative, which was launched in 1996, is the first comprehensive effort by the international community to reduce the external debt of the world's poorest countries. The Initiative will generate substantial savings relative to current and past public spending on health and education in these countries. Although there is ample scope for raising public ...

This paper studies a dynamic equilibrium model of financial innovation with heterogeneous beliefs and competition among sellers of a new security. We show that both volume and price of the security after it is introduced are sensitive to the differing beliefs of participating players. We present conditions for the innovator to continue issuing the new security and for the imitator to enter the ...

The collateralised debt obligation (CDO) market has grown rapidly, both globally and in Australia, over recent years. CDOs are securities that are issued against a pool of assets that can include bonds, loans or asset-backed securities (ABS) including other CDOs.2 Increasingly, this exposure is being created synthetically by the use of derivatives written on these assets, rather than physically...

In 1976 Black and Cox proposed a structural model where an obligor defaults when the value of its assets hits a certain barrier. In 2001 Zhou showed how the model can be extended to two obligors whose assets are correlated. In this paper we show how the model can be extended to a large number of different obligors. The correlations between the assets of the obligors are determined by one or mor...

ONETIZING the debt” conjures up fearsome images of excessive money stock growth resulting from Federal Reserve purchases of Treasury debt. Many analysts fear that debt monetization may produce undesirable economic consequences, such as more rapid inflation and, thus, higher nominal interest rates. There appears to be some confusion, however, over what debt monetization means, whether or to what...

In this paper, we present an intensity-based common factor model that is used to analyze the valuation of common systematic risks in multi-name credit and equity markets. In particular, we use a hybrid intensity model to price single-name credit instruments such as credit default swaps (CDSs), multi-name credit derivatives such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and equity index options...

We consider a model in which a principal must both repay a loan and motivate an agent to work hard. Output is non-contractible, so the principal faces a commitment problem with both her creditor and her agent. In a profit-maximizing equilibrium, the agent’s productivity is initially low and increases over time. Productivity continues increasing even after the debt has been repaid, eventually co...

In the past few years, there have been several new developments in the way real estate investment trusts (REITs) access capital. There has been an increasing trend toward the use of unsecured debt, and REITs may also alter their dividend policy in order to generate capital internally to the extent they can. There has been little empirical research into the market's reaction to unsecured debt an...