Sovereign Debt and Political Economy

主权债务与政治经济

• 批准号: 0647875
• 负责人: Manuel Amador
• 金额: $ 21.44万
• 依托单位: Stanford University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2007-01-01 至 2011-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0647875&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Sovereign; Debt; Political; Economy

Why do sovereign countries pay their debt? How do political-economy constraints affect international financial markets? Why do countries default and when should they? These are among the most basic and important questions in International Finance, affecting policy makers, international financial institutions, supra-national institutions and entire countries. However, economists do not have convincing answers to any of these questions, and hence important issues like the welfare effects of reforms to the international financial system cannot be analyzed. The current project develops and tests a tractable model of sovereign debt repayment that provides answers to several of these questions. The model generates a novel set of empirical predictions, and it can be used for welfare analysis. The first part of the project shows that the same economic forces that generate overspending in a political-economy model, can guarantee that a small open economy repays its sovereign obligations, even in the absence of direct sanctions. This model endogenously generates a non-trivial borrowing limit and ties the debt capacity of a country to several empirically relevant variables, such as the size of the shocks faced by the domestic economy, the number of political parties or regions, the discount rate of the domestic agents, and the international interest rate. The model provides several novel empirical predictions relating to the political system, domestic institutions and the amount of borrowing in an economy. The project generates an explicit model of savings by a group of agents that interact repeatedly. Hence, the applicability of the basic model extends beyond the particular case in focus: that of countries participating in the international financial market. For example, the model could be useful in explaining household savings behavior, public good provisions, and resource extraction problems, thereby giving it broader impacts.Once the model has been solved, comparative-static results can be generated and the implied empirical predictions tested. Finally, the model can be used to study the welfare effects of changes in the international financial system and in certain domestic institutions that are relevant for access to that system. This project aims to answer the questions of what keeps countries from defaulting on their external obligations. The modern quantitative literature has so far by-passed this question and assumed the existence of an exogenous cost of defaulting. However, the nature of this exogenous cost has been difficult to identify and quantify empirically. By introducing political economy considerations into a fairly standard model, this project develops a rich set up where debt is repaid in equilibrium and where the particular form of punishment after default is the one that has been prevalent among all defaults: countries when defaulting are excluded from borrowing again.

主权国家为什么要偿还债务？政治经济约束如何影响国际金融市场？各国为何违约，何时应该违约？这些是国际金融中最基本和最重要的问题之一，影响着政策制定者、国际金融机构、超国家机构和整个国家。然而，经济学家们对这些问题都没有令人信服的答案，因此无法分析国际金融体系改革的福利效应等重要问题。目前的项目开发和测试了一个易于处理的主权债务偿还模型，为其中几个问题提供了答案。该模型产生了一套新的经验预测，它可以用于福利分析。该项目的第一部分表明，在政治经济模型中产生过度支出的相同经济力量可以保证一个小型开放经济体偿还其主权义务，即使没有直接制裁。这一模型内生地产生了一个非平凡的借款限额，并将一国的债务能力与几个经验相关的变量联系起来，如国内经济所面临的冲击的大小、政党或地区的数量、国内代理人的贴现率以及国际利率。该模型提供了几个新的经验预测有关的政治制度，国内机构和借款额的经济。该项目通过一组重复交互的代理生成一个明确的节省模型。因此，基本模式的适用范围超出了所关注的具体情况：参与国际金融市场的国家。例如，该模型可以用于解释家庭储蓄行为、公共物品供应和资源开采问题，从而产生更广泛的影响。一旦模型求解，就可以生成比较静态结果并测试隐含的经验预测。最后，这一模式可用于研究国际金融体系和与进入该体系有关的某些国内机构的变化对福利的影响。该项目旨在回答是什么使各国不拖欠外债的问题。到目前为止，现代定量文献都没有涉及这个问题，而是假设违约的外生成本存在。然而，这种外生成本的性质很难根据经验加以确定和量化。 通过在一个相当标准的模型中引入政治经济学因素，本项目开发了一个丰富的设置，其中债务在均衡中偿还，违约后的特殊惩罚形式是所有违约中普遍存在的形式：违约国家被排除在再次借款之外。