Victoria Saporta

Analytics of sovereign debt restructuring

Over the past few years there has been an active debate among policy-makers on appropriate mechanisms for restructuring sovereign debt, particularly international bonds. In this paper a simple theoretical model is developed to analyse the merits of these proposals. The analysis suggests that collective action clauses (CACs) can resolve the inefficiencies caused by intra-creditor coordination problems, provided that all parties have complete information about each others preferences. In such a world, statutory mechanisms are unnecessary. This is no longer the case, however, when the benefits from reaching a restructuring agreement are private information to the debtor and its creditors. In this case, the inefficiencies induced by strategic behaviour the debtor-creditor bargaining problem cannot be resolved by the parties themselves: removing these inefficiencies would require the intervention of a third party.

The future of payment systems

Drawing on wide-ranging contributions from prominent international experts and discussing some of the most pressing issues facing policy makers and practitioners in the field of payment systems today, this volume provides cutting-edge perspectives on the current issues surrounding payment systems and their future. It covers a range of continually important topics, including: the form payment systems might take in the future; the risks associated with this evolution; the techniques being deployed to assess these risks; and the implications these risks have for the respective roles of the public and private sector. Produced in association with the Bank of England, this book is fascinating reading for practitioners and policy makers in the field of payment systems, as well as students and researchers engaged with the economics of payments and central banking policy.

Bail Out or Work Out? Theoretical Considerations

This paper assesses various crisis resolution proposals using a theoretical model of (liquidity and solvency) crisis. The model suggests that payments standstills and last-resort lending are equally efficient means of dealing with liquidity crises, while coordinated lending through creditor committees is second best. Debt write-downs are preferred to subsidised IMF financing when dealing with solvency crises, because of the negative moral hazard implications of the latter tool. Finally, the model suggests that international bankruptcy court proposals may be superior to existing contractual approaches in securing such write-downs.