In "Sovereign Debt Relief and its Aftermath", Carmen Reinhart and Christoph.
Trebesch (2016) examine 48 spells of default and subsequent restructuring of external.
sovereign debt. They focus on the debt overhang that resulted from World War.
I, which was dominated by official external sovereign debt (i.e., debts owed to.
government creditors). This episode has been largely overlooked in previous empirical.
research, which has studied sovereign defaults on the loans of private creditors.
almost exclusively. Reinhart and Trebesch compare this interwar episode to the betterdocumented.
emerging market cases from 1970 onward, which were primarily defaults.
on foreign banks and bondholders. Their paper, which is the first to compute various.
measures of debt relief for a representative group of crises and countries, finds that.
sovereign debt relief averaged 21% of GDP and 43% of external government debt for.
advanced economies crises in the 1930s, and 16% of GDP and 36% of external debt in.
middle / high-income emerging markets from 1978 to 2010. These authors also study.
the aftermath of debt relief by tracing the evolution of real per capita GDP, sovereign.
credit ratings, debt servicing costs, and the level of government debt (external and.
total) in a ten-year window around the relief event. Because the timing of debt relief is.
endogenous, they undertake a differences-in-differences analysis focusing on episodes.
in which debt relief is synchronous; examples include the Hoover Moratorium of
1931 and the Baker plan of 1986 (Brady initiative of 1990). During the five years
following decisive debt relief, per capita GDP is found to increase 11% and 20% for.
emerging markets and advanced economies, respectively. Also, within five years, the ratio of total government debt to GDP falls by 27 percentage points across emerging.
market episodes and by 22 percentage points in the interwar sample. The authors note,
however, that significant improvements in growth and ratings materialize only if the.
debt relief deal involves a reduction in the debt's face value. Reinhart and Trebesch find
that rescheduling operations that included maturity extensions and interest reductions.
were not followed by significant economic growth (after the researchers control for.
time and country fixed effects and conduct a counterfactual analysis).