Ugo Panizza

• Chair at Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies

This article examines the impact of Greece retroactively, via legislation, changing the terms in hundreds of billions of euros worth of Greek government bonds governed by domestic Greek law. As the abrogation of gold clauses in US government bonds by the US Congress in 1933 had been, the Greek action was decried as violative of the rule of law and...

We review the state of the sovereign debt literature and point out that the canonical model of sovereign debt cannot be easily reconciled with several facts about sovereign debt pricing and servicing. We identify and classify more than 20 puzzles. Some are well-known and documented, others are less so and are sometimes based on anecdotal evidence....

In this article, we examine the relations between risk, the choice of foreign or local contract terms (parameters), and maturity in the sovereign debt market. Our primary finding is that the maturities of bonds that carry a meaningful degree of risk are greater when the bonds are written under foreign parameters. This finding is consistent with the...

This article discusses the links between climate and debt sustainability by focusing on how climate mitigation and adaptation is paid for, and who pays for it. This requires thinking about instruments such as sovereign bonds, carbon credits, conditional official grants, and debt relief from both public and private sources. The article discusses the...

Notwithstanding announcements of progress, “international original sin” (the denomination of external debt in foreign currency) remains a persistent phenomenon in emerging markets. Although some middle-income countries have succeeded in developing markets in local-currency sovereign debt and attracting foreign investors, they continue to hedge thei...

This article introduces the Haitian Independence Debt of 1825 to the odious debt and sovereign debt literatures. We argue that the legal doctrine of odious debt is surprisingly and perhaps indefensibly narrow, possibly because of historical contingency rather than any underlying logic or principle. The story of the Haitian Independence Debt of 1825...

This paper builds a new dataset on bank ownership and finds no evidence of a negative correlation between state-ownership of banks and economic growth. Banking crises predict increases in state-ownership but that there is no evidence that high state-ownership predicts banking crises. Contrary to past literature, the paper also shows that recent dat...

The consequences of the climate change problem are global. Contributions to solving that problem are therefore properly expected to come from every country to a greater or lesser degree depending on their share of responsibility for environmental pollution and their financial resources. But some countries may have a compelling argument for why they...

We use firm-level data from six Central and Eastern European economies to examine whether political connections ease financial constraints faced by firms. We show that politically connected firms are characterized by higher leverage, lower profitability, and lower productivity of capital than unconnected firms. However, we do not find any significa...

The post-Global Financial Crisis period shows a surge in corporate leverage in emerging markets and a number of countries with deteriorated corporate financial fragility indicators (Altman's Z-score). Firm size plays a critical role in the relationship between leverage, firm fragility and exchange rate movements in emerging markets. While the relat...

Contrary to widespread presumption, a surprisingly large number of countries have been able to finance a significant fraction of their investment for extended periods using foreign finance. While many of these episodes are in countries where official finance is important, we also identify episodes where a substantial fraction of domestic investment...

This paper documents a set of stylized facts about leverage and financial fragility in the nonfinancial corporate sector in emerging markets since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Corporate debt vulnerability indicators prior to the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) attributed to corporate financial roots provide a benchmark for comparison. The firm-l...

IMF forecasts and the EU's Fiscal Compact foresee Europe’s heavily indebted countries running primary budget surpluses of as much as 5 percent of GDP for as long as 10 years in order to maintain debt sustainability and bring their debt/GDP ratios down to the Compact’s 60 percent target. We show that primary surpluses this large and persistent are r...

This paper looks at how the interaction between democracy and education affects the quality of government. Using various cross-sectional and dynamic panel data specifications, we show that the success of democratic institutions is closely related to the educational attainment of the population. Democratic elections do not foster the quality of gove...

In this double issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy we publish a set of papers concerned with the mobilization of domestic and foreign capital in support of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals that were launched in September 2015. The papers were originally presented at a conference on ‘Financing for Development’ organized by...

This paper summarises the main findings of the literature on the relationship between financial and economic development (the known knowns), points to directions for future research (the known unknowns), and then speculates on the third Rumsfeldian category. The known knowns section organises the empirical literature on finance and growth into thre...

Financial Development and Economic Growth : Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, and Unknown Unknowns This paper summarizes the main findings of the literature on the relationship between financial and economic development (the known knowns), points to directions for future research (the known unknowns), and then speculates on the third Rumsfeldian catego...

This paper studies the relationship between sovereign spreads and the interaction between debt composition and debt levels in advanced and emerging market countries. It finds that in emerging market countries there is a significant correlation between spreads and debt levels. This correlation, however, is not statistically significant in countries...

This paper shows that debt crises do not always have a fiscal nature and suggests that fiscal retrenchment may not be the optimal response to a crisis that did not originate from irresponsible fiscal policies. The paper starts by discussing the origin of debt crises and the unexplained part of public debt. It then discusses policies for controlling...

This paper surveys the recent literature on the links between public debt and economic growth in advanced economies. We find that theoretical models yield ambiguous results. Whether high levels of public debt have a negative effect on long-run growth is thus an empirical question. While many papers have found a negative correlation between debt and...

Sovereign debt crises occur regularly and often violently. Yet there is no legally and politically recognized procedure for restructuring the debt of bankrupt sovereigns. Procedures of this type have been periodically debated, but so far been rejected, for two main reasons. First, countries have been reluctant to give up power to supranational rule...

This paper examines whether there is a threshold above which financial development no longer has a positive effect on economic growth. We use different empirical approaches to show that there can indeed be "too much" finance. In particular, our results suggest that finance starts having a negative effect on output growth when credit to the private...

This paper uses an instrumental variable approach to study whether public debt has a causal effect on economic growth in a sample of OECD countries. The results are consistent with the existing literature that has found a negative correlation between debt and growth. However, the link between debt and growth disappears once we instrument debt with...

Cet article traite de la littérature sur la finance et le développement économique. Il propose tout d’abord une description des rôles de la finance, ainsi qu’une définition de l’efficacité financière. Il poursuit avec une discussion autour de la question suivante : les pays peuvent-ils présenter des secteurs financiers « trop importants » pour la t...

Published by Palgrave MacmillanThis chapter reviews the literature on finance and economic development. It starts with a description of the roles of finance, a definition of financial efficiency, and a discussion of whether countries may have financial sectors that are ‘too large’ compared to the size of the domestic economy. Next, the author descr...

he world is entering its first global recession since the early 1970s. Growth prospects were already weak during the first months of 2001, but the events of September 11 destroyed any hope of escaping a global recession. The most recent estimates from the International Monetary Fund predict that during 2001 and 2002, world output will grow at a rat...

This paper synthesizes studies analyzing the effects of capital account liberalization on industry growth while controlling for financial crises, domestic financial development and the strength of institutions. We find evidence that financial openness has positive effects on the growth of financially dependent industries, although these growth-enha...

This paper uses a new dataset on the composition of public debt in developing and emerging market countries to look at the correlation between country characteristics and domestic debt share. While the paper finds that most variables have the expected sign, it also finds that country characteristics cannot explain regional differences in the compos...

No abstract available.

This paper updates our previous work on the level and evolution of original sin. It shows that while the number of countries that issue local-currency debt in international markets has increased in the past decade, this improvement has been quite modest. Although we find that countries have been borrowing at home, thanks to deepening domestic marke...

This paper builds a new dataset with detailed information on the universe of foreign government bonds issued in New York in the 1920s and uses these data to describe the behavior of the financial intermediaries which operated in the New York market during the period leading to the interwar debt crisis. The paper starts by showing that concerns over...

Chapter 9 by Susan Rose-Ackerman is a tour de force. It contains a comprehensive survey of the literature and a careful description of the main challenges for institutional reform in Latin America. Since the chapter is so comprehensive, it is almost impossible to focus on something that was not already mentioned in it and to prepare an alternative...

This paper presents a non-technical survey of the modern literature on international government debt. In doing so, it aims to match predictions made by theoretical models with the existing empirical evidence and to identify the models that best explain the real world experience of sovereign debt and sovereign default. The paper starts by describing...

Throughout his sharp writings and lucid presentations on Latin American economies, Professor Werner Baer has shown a vivid interest in exchange rate policy and its growth and welfare consequences. In particular, he has consistently been concerned with how macroeconomic strategies shape the income distribution and the level of unemployment in develo...

This paper builds a new dataset with detailed information on the universe of foreign government bonds issued in New York in the 1920s and uses these data to describe the behavior of the financial intermediaries which operated in the New York market during the period leading to the interwar debt crisis. The paper starts by showing that concerns over...

This paper surveys the recent literature on sovereign debt and relates it to the evolution of the legal principles underlying the sovereign debt market and the experience of the most recent debt crises and defaults. It finds limited support for theories that explain the feasibility of sovereign debt based on either external sanctions or exclusion f...

How does the management and resolution of the current crisis compare with the response of the Nordic countries in the early 1990s, widely regarded as exemplary? We argue that, while intervention has been prompter, the measures taken so far remain less comprehensive and in-depth. In particular, the cleansing of balance sheets has proceeded more slow...

This paper uses individual-level data and a differences-in-differences estimation strategy to test whether the education gender gap of Muslims is different from that of Christians. In particular, the paper uses data for young Lebanese and shows that, other things equal, girls (both Muslim and Christian) tend to receive more education than boys and...

This paper evaluates empirically four types of cost that may result from an international sovereign default: reputational costs, international trade exclusion costs, costs to the domestic economy through the financial system, and political costs to the authorities. It finds that the economic costs are generally significant but short-lived, and some...

The cost of holding reserves is often estimated as the sovereign spread over the risk-free return on reserves paid on the debt issued to purchase them, which ignores the benign effect of reserves on the spread. This paper illustrates this numerically, showing that these costs, as typically measured, may have been considerably overstated.

This chapter first sets out the book’s three main objectives: (i) To document the characteristics of Latin American bond markets and evaluate their “underdevelopment” in absolute terms and relative to other forms of financing; (ii) to identify the factors behind the recent growth (or lack thereof) in these bond markets; and (iii) to discuss whether...

The first comprehensive examination of the importance of local bond market development in Latin America, with conceptual and comparative assessments, case studies of six countries, and new, unique data sets. Developing local bond markets is high on the policy agenda of Latin America. Bond markets are an essential component of a well-functioning fin...

The first comprehensive examination of the importance of local bond market development in Latin America, with conceptual and comparative assessments, case studies of six countries, and new, unique data sets. Developing local bond markets is high on the policy agenda of Latin America. Bond markets are an essential component of a well-functioning fin...

Analysis of public debt in developing countries has traditionally focused on external debt. However, in recent years, several developing countries adopted aggressive policies aimed at retiring public external debt and substituting it with domestically issued debt. This paper discusses alternative definitions of external and domestic debt and then i...

This chapter emphasizes that it matters whether domestic debt means debt issued in local currency (at home or abroad) or to local investors (in domestic or foreign currency) or governed by local law (also in domestic or foreign currency). From the perspective of organizing a debt workout, the governing law is the most important issue, while from an...

This paper has three objectives. It discusses the main developments and new issues that have arisen after the Monterrey Conference. It critically reviews the Monterrey Consensus on external debt. It provides a set of recommendations for reviewing the implementation of the Monterrey Consensus, to take place in Doha, Qatar, in December 2008. In doing...

This paper looks at how macroeconomic volatility is transmitted to the labor market. It estimates employment, unemployment, and wage Okun coefficients and uses them to show that, compared with industrial countries, Latin American countries adjust to shocks more through wages than through employment. It shows that inflation plays some role in explai...

This paper discusses whether a country should conduct fiscal policy by targeting a structural (or cyclically adjusted) fiscal balance. The paper is divided into three sections. The first section discusses the concept of cyclically adjusted balance (CAB) and points out practical and conceptual problems related to the interpretation and the measureme...

Existe una vasta literatura que muestra que la política fiscal en países industrializados es acíclica o contracíclica y procíclica en países emergentes. Mucha de esta literatura se basa en regresiones MCO que se enfocan en la correlación entre una variable fiscal (usualmente el balance presupuestario o crecimiento del gasto) ya sea crecimiento del...

There is a large literature showing that fiscal policy is either acyclical or countercyclical in industrial countries and procyclical in developing countries. Most of this literature is based on OLS regressions that focus on the correlation between a fiscal variable (usually the budget balance or expenditure growth) and either GDP growth or some me...

This study is concerned with Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and economic growth across the world for the period 1991?2001. This article produces fresh empirical evidence on the relation between FDI and economic growth obtained from single-equation and simultaneous-equation estimates for 140 countries using macroeconomic variables. The results indi...

This paper uses a new dataset to reassess the relationship between bank ownership and bank performance, providing separate estimations for developing and industrial countries. It finds that state-owned banks located in developing countries tend to have lower profitability and higher costs than their private counterparts, and that the opposite is tr...

We revisit the public banks debate, survey the theoretical arguments and test the robustness (and expand) the existing empirical evidence. While we find some support for the view that public banks do not allocate credit optimally, we also report indicative evidence that they exert a positive influence on private bank efficiency, and may contribute...

Few would dispute that sovereign defaults entail significant economic costs, including, most notably, important output losses. However, most of the evidence supporting this conventional wisdom, based on annual observations, suffers from serious measurement and identification problems. To address these drawbacks, we examine the impact of default on...

Utilizando un panel de datos desbalanceado que cubre noventa y tres países durante el periodo 1990-2002, este estudio analiza la relación empírica entre la concentración bancaria y la volatilidad del crédito. El estudio encuentra una fuerte relación negativa entre la concentración del crédito y su sensibilidad a choques externos. Asimismo, muestra...

En este trabajo se construye y emplea una nueva base de datos para evaluar la relación que hay entre la propiedad de los bancos y el desempeño de los mismos, y se obtienen distintos indicadores para países en desarrollo y para países industrializados. Se descubre que los bancos propiedad del Estado en países en desarrollo tienden a exhibir una rent...

Recent empirical and theoretical literature on the impact of real exchange rate devaluations on economic performance questions the traditional expansionary effect generated within standard Mundell-Fleming models. Contractionary devaluations may arise when firms face maturity or currency mismatches that, when faced with real exchange rate depreciati...

In this paper, we introduce the first comprehensive database on sovereign debt systematically compiled to ensure comparability, for all countries in the Americas, and use this new data to highlight the main stylized facts regarding sovereign debt for developing America in the last two decades. We find that debt ratios in developing America are comp...

Prior work variously ascribes the forward puzzle -the low slope in the Fama (1984) regression of the exchange rate change on the forward premium- to various model misspecications or statistical problems with non-stationary forward premia, but no single theory fully succeeds in explaining the puzzle. In this paper we simultaneously address the model...

Spreads on sovereign bonds are at an all-time low, at least since the current era of emerging economy bond markets began in the 1990s. This paper examines the current state of the international and domestic bond markets and asks whether the current favorable trends will constitute a durable change or a temporary fad and discusses what the IDB and o...

Commonly used data sets on the level of public debt provide incomplete country and period coverage. This article presents a new data set that includes complete series of central government debt for 89 countries over the period 1991 to 2005 and for 7 other countries for the period 1993 to 2005.

This paper uses a difference-in-difference methodology similar to the one originally proposed by Rajan and Zingales (1998) to test whether defaulting hurts the more export-oriented industries. Strong support for this hypothesis was found, but contrary to the findings of previous studies, our estimations suggest that the effect of defaults is short-...

(Disponible en idioma inglés únicamente) En este trabajo se sigue una metodología de diferencia en diferencia parecida a la que propusieron originalmente Rajan y Zingales (1998) para comprobar si el incumplimiento perjudica a las industrias más orientadas a la exportación. Se halló un respaldo considerable a esta hipótesis, pero, contrariamente a l...

(Disponible en idioma inglés) La base de datos se puede acceder en: http://www. iadb. org/res/pub_desc. cfm?pub_id=DBA-005

This paper shows that budget deficits account for a relatively small fraction of debt growth and that stock-flow reconciliation, which is often considered a residual entity, is one of the key determinants of debt dynamics. After having explained the importance of the stock-flow reconciliation, the paper shows that this residual entity can be partly...

This paper documents large cross-country differences in the long-run volatility of the real exchange rate. It shows that the real exchange rate of developing countries is approximately three times more volatile than the real exchange rate in industrial countries. The paper shows that this difference in volatility cannot be explained by the fact tha...

Inflation can "grease" the wheels of the labor market by relaxing downward wage rigidity but it can also increase uncertainty and have a negative "sand" effect. This paper studies the grease effect of inflation by looking at whether the interaction between inflation and labor market regulations affects how employment responds to changes in output....

( Disponible en idioma ingl�s �nicamente) En este trabajo se demuestra que los d�ficit presupuestarios constituyen una porci�n relativamente peque�a del crecimiento de la deuda y que la conciliaci�n entre las existencias y los flujos, que a menudo se considera una entidad residual, es uno de los factores determinantes de la din�mica de la deuda. Tr...