What role did the US courts play in the Argentine debt swap of 2005? What are the implications for the future of creditor rights in sovereign bond markets? The judge in the Argentine case has, it appears, deftly exploited creditor heterogeneity – between holdouts seeking capital gains and...

To check hyperinflation, Argentina pegged the peso at one US dollar in 1991. This stopped inflation in its tracks: but, with the rise of the dollar against the Euro and the substantial devaluation of the Brazilian real, the peso became increasingly over-valued leading to a significant...

Producing high technology output and supplying sophisticated services often involves costly investment in industry-specific skills. But the threat of poaching means that it is the individual ‘stakeholder’, not the firm, who must bear the cost. We investigate various mechanisms for funding...

When Argentine sovereign default in December 2001 led to a collapse of the peso, the burden of dollar debt became demonstrably unsustainable. But it was not clear what restructuring was feasible, nor when. Eventually, in 2005 after a delay of more than three years, a supermajority of creditors...

Alan Walters has suggested that the European Monetary System will prove dynamically unstable when capital controls are removed. The argument is analysed within a model that includes overlapping contracts. It is found that the short-run effects predicted by Walters only arise when the credibility...

An ‘efficiency wage’ model developed for Western economies is reinterpreted for Soviet Russia assuming that it was the Gulag not unemployment that acted as a ‘worker-discipline device’. Archival data now available allows for a basic account of the dynamics of the Gulag to be estimated....

We examine whether Brazilian sovereign spreads of over 20% in 2002 could be due to contagion from Argentina or to domestic politics, or both. Treating unilateral debt restructuring as a policy variable gives rise to the possibility of self-fulfilling crisis, which can be triggered by contagion....

Exchange rate behavior is analyzed in the context of a stochastic rational expectations model in which there are random shocks to the price setting mechanism and in which the authorities choose to impose either nominal or real exchange rate bands. Results are compared to those that emerge from a...

Following the financial crisis of 2008/9, there has been renewed interest in what Greenwald and Stiglitz dubbed ‘pecuniary externalities’. Two that affect borrowers and lenders balance sheets in pro-cyclical fashion are described, along with measures that might help curb their destabilising...

In the context of revived output growth and business confidence in the UK, we analyse forward guidance as a ‘coordination device’, indicating that monetary accommodation will be available for a welcome and long-awaited shift out of prolonged recession. As David Miles has emphasised, however,...