IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/3424.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Sovereign Debt, Reputation, and Credit Terms

Author

Listed:
  • Jonathan Eaton

Abstract

I develop a model in which sovereign debtors repay debt in order to maintain a reputation for repayment. Repayment gives creditors reason to think that the debtor will suffer adverse consequences if it defaults, so they continue to lend. I compare a situation in which competitive lenders earn a zero profit on each loan with one in which they can make long-term commitments to individual borrowers, so that the zero-profit condition applies only in the long run. In many circumstances a borrower benefits, ex ante, if lenders commit to denying credit to a borrower in default even if at that point a subsequent loan is profitable. Furthermore, a "debt overhang," while possibly altering credit terms, does not cause profitable investment opportunities to go unexploited.

Suggested Citation

  • Jonathan Eaton, 1990. "Sovereign Debt, Reputation, and Credit Terms," NBER Working Papers 3424, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:3424
    Note: ITI IFM
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w3424.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Cole, Harold L & Dow, James & English, William B, 1995. "Default, Settlement, and Signalling: Lending Resumption in a Reputational Model of Sovereign Debt," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 36(2), pages 365-385, May.
    2. Bulow, Jeremy & Rogoff, Kenneth, 1989. "Sovereign Debt: Is to Forgive to Forget?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 79(1), pages 43-50, March.
    3. Atkeson, Andrew, 1991. "International Lending with Moral Hazard and Risk of Repudiation," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 59(4), pages 1069-1089, July.
    4. Timothy J. Kehoe & David K. Levine, 1993. "Debt-Constrained Asset Markets," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 60(4), pages 865-888.
    5. Stiglitz, Joseph E & Weiss, Andrew, 1983. "Incentive Effects of Terminations: Applications to the Credit and Labor Markets," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 73(5), pages 912-927, December.
    6. Grossman, Herschel I & Van Huyck, John B, 1988. "Sovereign Debt as a Contingent Claim: Excusable Default, Repudiation, and Reputation," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 78(5), pages 1088-1097, December.
    7. Jonathan Eaton & Mark Gersovitz & Joseph E. Stiglitz, 1991. "The Pure Theory of Country Risk," NBER Chapters, in: International Volatility and Economic Growth: The First Ten Years of The International Seminar on Macroeconomics, pages 391-435, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Brian D. Wright & Kenneth M. Kletzer, 2000. "Sovereign Debt as Intertemporal Barter," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(3), pages 621-639, June.
    2. Aguiar, Mark & Amador, Manuel, 2014. "Sovereign Debt," Handbook of International Economics, in: Gopinath, G. & Helpman, . & Rogoff, K. (ed.), Handbook of International Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 0, pages 647-687, Elsevier.
    3. Kletzer, Kenneth M. & Wright, Brian D., 1998. "Sovereign Debt as Intertemporal Barter," Santa Cruz Department of Economics, Working Paper Series qt4qg3c42v, Department of Economics, UC Santa Cruz.
    4. Karsten Jeske, 2005. "Private international debt with risk of repudiation," FRB Atlanta Working Paper 2001-16, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
    5. Fernando Broner & Alberto Martin & Jaume Ventura, 2010. "Sovereign Risk and Secondary Markets," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 100(4), pages 1523-1555, September.
    6. Hileman, Garrick, 2012. "The seven mechanisms for achieving sovereign debt sustainability," Economic History Working Papers 42878, London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History.
    7. Mark Aguiar & Manuel Amador, 2013. "Sovereign Debt: A Review," NBER Working Papers 19388, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Fernando Broner & Jaume Ventura, 2011. "Globalization and Risk Sharing," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 78(1), pages 49-82.
    9. Onur Ozgur, 2005. "A Model of Dynamic Liquidity Contracts," Microeconomics 0502004, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    10. Yue, Vivian Z., 2010. "Sovereign default and debt renegotiation," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 80(2), pages 176-187, March.
    11. Eaton, Jonathan & Fernandez, Raquel, 1995. "Sovereign debt," Handbook of International Economics, in: G. M. Grossman & K. Rogoff (ed.), Handbook of International Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 3, pages 2031-2077, Elsevier.
    12. Toan Phan, 2016. "Information, Insurance and the Sustainability of Sovereign Debt," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 22, pages 93-108, October.
    13. Cole, Harold L. & Kehoe, Patrick J., 1995. "The role of institutions in reputation models of sovereign debt," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 45-64, February.
    14. Harold L. Cole & Patrick J. Kehoe, 1991. "Reputation with multiple relationships: reviving reputation models of debt," Staff Report 137, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
    15. Bora Durdu & Enrique G. Mendoza, 2004. "Putting the brakes on Sudden Stops: the financial frictions - moral hazard tradeoff of asset price guarantees," Proceedings, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, issue Jun.
    16. Silvia Marchesi & Tania Masi, 2019. "Sovereign risk after sovereign restructuring. Private and official default," Working Papers 423, University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics, revised Nov 2019.
    17. Cristina Arellano, 2005. "Default Risk, the Real Exchange Rate and Income Fluctuations in Emerging Economies," 2005 Meeting Papers 516, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    18. Harold L. Cole & Patrick J. Kehoe, 1996. "Reputation Spillover Across Relationships with Enduring and Transient Beliefs: Reviving reputation Models of Debt," NBER Working Papers 5486, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    19. Grossman, Herschel I. & Han, Taejoon, 1999. "Sovereign debt and consumption smoothing," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 44(1), pages 149-158, August.
    20. Mauricio Drelichman & Hans-Joachim Voth, 2015. "Risk sharing with the monarch: contingent debt and excusable defaults in the age of Philip II, 1556–1598," Cliometrica, Journal of Historical Economics and Econometric History, Association Française de Cliométrie (AFC), vol. 9(1), pages 49-75, January.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:3424. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.