In this paper we use a new dataset on the composition of public debt in developing and
emerging market countries to look at the correlation between country characteristics and
domestic debt share. We start by showing that there are large regional differences in the
composition of public debt and then we check whether our regressions could help us in
understanding the determinants of these differences. Even though we tried to control for a
large set of variables, we found that our explanatory variables play almost no role in
explaining regional differences. In fact, a simple simulation based on our regressions
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shows that the "adjusted" regional differences are larger than the raw differences. Another
surprising finding is that we do not find a strong correlation between inflationary history
and domestic debt share. However, more careful investigation shows that this finding is
due to the presence of capital controls. In countries with moderate or no capital controls
there is a statistically significant negative correlation between domestic debt share and
inflation.