TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bulow,Jeremy I.
AU  - Rogoff,Kenneth
TI  - Sovereign Debt Restructurings:  Panacea or Pangloss?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 2637
PY  - 1988
Y2  - June 1988
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w2637
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w2637.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Jeremy I. Bulow
Stanford University
Graduate School of Business
Stanford, CA  94305-7298
Tel: 650/723-2160
Fax: 650/725-8916
E-Mail: jbulow@stanford.edu

Kenneth S. Rogoff
Thomas D Cabot Professor of Public Policy
Economics Department
Harvard University
Littauer Center 216
Cambridge, MA 02138-3001
Tel: 617-495-4022
Fax: 617/495-7730
E-Mail: krogoff@harvard.edu
AB  - The most widely proposed LDC debt plans are flawed by their failure to recognize the fundamental differences between corporate and sovereign debt. Consequently, many plans intended to help highly-indebted countries mainly aid their foreign creditors. This paper emphasizes the crucial distinction between marginal and average sovereign debt. This distinction provides the cornerstone for an understanding of debt buybacks, debt-equity swaps, and debt-for-debt swaps involving new classes of seniority. Highly indebted countries would benefit more from direct transfers than from the same resources spent on any of these financial engineering schemes.
ER  -