Vulnerability, Crisis and Debt Maturity: Do IMF Interventions Shorten the Length of Borrowing?

This paper studies how IMF lending affects countries’ bonds maturity. Debt maturity was claimed to be one of the causes of the crisis of recent years: Too much short-term debt would be the seed of self-fulfilling crisis. In turn, one of the goals of the IMF interventions is to prevent crises and to alleviate their effects once they occur. I find evidence that, on average, IMF interventions reduce countries’ debt maturity which would be a non-desirable effect. However, I also find evidence that the final effect depends on countries’ fundamentals. The IMF would make countries borrow at longer terms (or reduce less the maturity) when the fundamentals are relatively weak.