On the Role and E ects of IMF Seniority

Diego Saravia ()

No 131, Econometric Society 2004 Latin American Meetings from Econometric Society

Abstract: The paper presents a three period model that studies the e ects of IMF loans on borrowers’ and lenders’ welfare highlighting the fact that the IMF has both de jure and de facto seniority rights over private creditors. It is shown that an IMF intervention affects borrowers and lenders in different ways. Ex-post, once capital is installed and a liquidity shock occurs, an IMF intervention always makes the borrower country better off. The e ects on non-senior lenders depend on the size of the senior intervention and on the country’s solvency situation. IMF intervention makes existing creditors worse off when the country’s solvency situation is either very good or weak, but makes them better off when solvency is in an intermediate range, consistent with the nonlinearities found empirically in Mody and Saravia (2003). The possibility of future senior intervention a ects the optimal level of investment ex-ante, and it may be the case that the borrower country would be better off by committing today not to borrow from the IMF in the future. Since a country has incentives to borrow from the IMF once the shock occurs, this promise is not time consistent and an institution with clear rules about when to intervene will be welfare improving

Keywords: Seniority; IMF; ex-ante; ex-post; welfare e ects. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E0 F0 F3 F4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-08-11
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: On the role and effects of IMF seniority (2010)
Working Paper: On The Role and Effects of IMF Seniority (2009)
Working Paper: On the Role and Effects of IMF Seniority (2007)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecm:latm04:131

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Econometric Society 2004 Latin American Meetings from Econometric Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().