A traditional explanation for why sovereign governments repay debts is that they want to keep good reputations so they can easily borrow more. Bulow and Rogoff show that this argument is invalid under two conditions: (i) there is a single debt relationship, and (ii) regardless of their past actions, governments can earn the (possibly state-contingent) market rate of return by saving abroad. Bulow and Rogoff conjecture that, even under condition (ii), in more general reputation models with multiple relationships and spillover across them, reputation may support debt. This paper shows what is needed for this conjecture to be true.
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Paper provided by Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in its series Staff Report with number
209.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Jonathan Eaton & Raquel Fernandez, 1995.
"Sovereign Debt,"
NBER Working Papers
5131, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
Eaton, J. & Fernandez, R., 1995.
"Sovereign Debt,"
Papers
37, Boston University - Department of Economics.
Eaton, Jonathan & Fernandez, Raquel, 1995.
"Sovereign debt,"
Handbook of International Economics,
in: G. M. Grossman & K. Rogoff (ed.), Handbook of International Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 3, pages 2031-2077
Elsevier.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
Michael Kremer & Seema Jayachandran, 2002.
"Odious Debt,"
NBER Working Papers
8953, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Seema Jayachandran & Michael Kremer, 2006.
"Odious Debt,"
American Economic Review,
American Economic Association, vol. 96(1), pages 82-92, March.
[Downloadable!]
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