Jeromin Zettelmeyer

The Greek Debt Restructuring: An Autopsy

The Greek debt restructuring of 2012 stands out in the history of sovereign defaults. It achieved very large debt relief – over 50 per cent of 2012 GDP – with minimal financial disruption, using a combination of new legal techniques, exceptionally large cash incentives, and official sector pressure on key creditors. But it did so at a cost. The timing and design of the restructuring left money on the table from the perspective of Greece, created a large risk for European taxpayers, and set precedents – particularly in its very generous treatment of holdout creditors – that are likely to make future debt restructurings in Europe more difficult.

International Bailouts, Moral Hazard, and Conditionality

The large international bailouts of the 1990s have been criticized for different reasons, in particular for generating moral hazard at the expense of the global taxpayer. We argue in this paper that some of these concerns are exaggerated or misleading because international bailouts have no or very little cost to the international community and the global taxpayer. The problem, in our view, is rather to ensure that the international safety net is not used as an input into bad domestic policies. This may require a shift towards ex ante conditionality, in the sense that the availability and size of official crisis lending need to be conditional on government policies before the crisis.

Moral Hazard and International Crisis Lending; A Test

We test for the existence of a moral hazard effect attributable to official crisis lending by analyzing the evolution of sovereign bond spreads in emerging markets before and after the Russian crisis. The nonbailout of Russia in August 1998 is interpreted as an event that decreased the perceived probability of future crisis lending to emerging markets. In the presence of moral hazard, such an event should raise not only the level of spreads, but also the sensitivity with which spreads reflect fundamentals as well as their cross-country dispersion. We find strong evidence for all three effects.

Bankruptcy Procedures for Sovereigns: A History of Ideas, 1976-2001

This paper describes the evolution of ideas to apply bankruptcy reorganization principles to sovereign debt crises. Our focus is on policy proposals between the late 1970s and Anne Kruegers (2001) proposed “Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism,” with brief reference to the economics literature on sovereign debt. We describe the perceived inefficiencies that motivate proposals, and how proposals seek to change debtor and creditor incentives. We find that there has been a moving consensus on what constitutes the underlying problem, but not on how to fix it. The range of proposed approaches remains broad and only recently shows some signs of narrowing.

What Moves Capital to Transition Economies

Between 1991 and 1999, capital flows to 25 transition economies in Europe and the former Soviet Union differed widely in terms of overall levels and the share and composition of private flows. With some exceptions (notably Russia), the main form of private inflows was foreign direct investment. Portfolio investment was volatile and concentrated in a handful of countries. Regressions show that direct investment can be well explained in terms of economic fundamentals, whereas the presence of a financial market infrastructure and a property-rights indicator are the only explanatory variables that seem to have had a robust effect on portfolio investment.

International Government Debt

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 how the levels and structure of international government debt have evolved during the last 40 years. Next, it reviews economic theories of sovereign debt, whose defining characteristic is the impossibility of enforcing repayment and discusses recent attempts to reconcile the theory with the evidence. Finally, the paper discusses the role of debt structure and presents two alternative views on the relationship between debt structure and crises.

The Effect of External Conditionson Growth in Latin America

This paper investigates the sensitivity of Latin American GDP growth to external developments using a Bayesian VAR model with informative steady-state priors. The model is estimated on quarterly data from 1994 to 2006 on key external and Latin American variables. It finds that 50 to 60 percent of the variation in Latin American GDP growth is accounted for by external shocks. Conditional forecasts for a variety of external scenarios suggest that Latin American growth is robust to moderate declines in commodity prices and U.S. or world growth, but sensitive to more extreme shocks, particularly a combined external slowdown and tightening of world financial conditions.

ECB Interventions in Distressed Sovereign Debt Markets: The Case of Greek Bonds

This paper analyses the determinants and effects of ECB interventions in times of severe distress. We focus on the Greek government bond market in mid-2010 and use a unique new dataset to show, for the first time, what type of bonds the ECB bought. We then explore the short-term effects of ECB purchases at the bond-level. The results show a large impact of the interventions on the targeted instruments. Bonds bought by the ECB see a much steeper drop in yields than those not bought. This is consistent with theories of “local supply effects” in segmented or illiquid bond markets.

Making a Voluntary Greek Debt Exchange Work

Within the next few months, the Greek government, is supposed to persuade private creditors holding about EUR 200bn in its bonds to voluntarily exchange their existing bonds for new bonds that pay roughly 50 percent less. This may work with large creditors whose failure to participate in a debt exchange could trigger a Greek default, but may not persuade smaller creditors, who will be told that their claims will continue to be fully serviced if they do not participate in the exchange. This paper proposes an approach to dealing with this free rider problem that exploits the fact that with some probability, the proposed exchange might be followed by an involuntary restructuring some time in the future. The idea is to design the new bonds that creditors are offered in the exchange in a way that make them much harder to restructure than the current Greek government bonds. This is easy to do because the vast majority of outstanding Greek government bonds lack standard creditor protections. Hence, creditors would be offered a bond that performs much worse than their current bond if things go according to plan, but much better if things do not. They will accept this instrument if (1) the risk of a new Greek debt restructuring in the medium term is sufficiently high; (2) there is an expectation that the next restructuring probably will not be voluntary.

European Transition at Twenty Assessing Progress in Countries and Sectors

As Central and Eastern Europe are marking the end of communism and the commencement of the process of transition towards democracy and market economy, it is natural to ask how far they have progressed relative to the objectives set at the time. How different is the transition region still from that of other countries at comparable levels of economic prosperity? Are there major differences within the transition region in this regard? In which countries and sectors, in particular, does the transition agenda remain incomplete? What should be the main priorities for future reforms?