A Political Model Sovereign Debt RepaymentNo 762, 2004 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Abstract: Bulow and Rogoff (1989) show that a country that has access to a sufficiently rich asset market cannot commit to repay its debts and therefore should be unable to borrow. This is because for any debt contract, there exists a time at which the country is made better off by defaulting and replicating the payoffs of the debt contract through savings in the asset market. This paper provides an answer to this paradox based on a political economy model of debt. It shows that the presence of political uncertainty reduces the ability of a country to save, and hence to replicate the original debt contract after default. In a model where different parties alternate in power, an incumbent party with a low probability of remaining in power has a high short-term discount rate and is therefore unwilling to save. The current incumbent party realizes that in the future whoever achieves power will be impatient as well, making the accumulation of assets unsustainable. This time-inconsistency is shown to be equivalent to the problem faced by a hyperbolic consumer. Because of their inability tosave, politicians demand debt ex-post and the desire to borrow again in the future enforces repayment today Keywords: sovereign debt; political economy (search for similar items in EconPapers) There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed004:762 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in 2004 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
Swedish Business School at Örebro University.