VIII Summer School (2005)

Redefining the role of international economics organisations:
Poverty, debt, trade and transition

— Contributed Papers —

Chiang & Coronado | Jz. Buedo | Marques | Sprenger

 

Gisella Chiang and Francisco Coronado, "A two step approach to assess the costs of sovereign defaults"

The theoretical and empirical literature of international finance has emphasized many aspects of debt crisis and the sovereign decision regarding defaults and debt restructuring. Many authors have shown how international institutions (IFIs) and private creditors have performed in terms of their returns on outstanding loans to emerging market and developing economies. However these numerous works have said little about the performance of sovereign borrowers in terms of the losses that can be associated with debt crisis. This is precisely the contribution of our paper to the literature. We present a two-step evaluation of debt-related crisis in terms of forgone output growth. Our approach allows us to integrated to the analysis not only the e.ects of the default decision as such, but also the e.ects associated with the expectations that operates during the transition to the default equilibrium.

Maria Jimenez Buedo, "Who’s afraid of Globalization? Academic and Political discourses on the Internationalization of the Economy and Redistribution"

The paper analyzes and classifies the theoretical arguments found in the political economy literature on how the internationalization of markets (both financial and of goods) affects the room for redistributive policies. It then compares these arguments with a stylized mapping of those found in the discourse of the main families of European political parties (conservative, social-democratic, and regionalist and nationalist groups). Finally, it analyses these with the discourse of specific social movement organizations of a self-declared anti-globalization stand. In particular, we will analyze the role that these discourses attribute to international economic organizations. In view of the contrasting of these three types of discourse, we build a map that can clarify the different public perceptions that these audiences have of the globalization phenomena.

Helena Marques, "New patters of trade ,off-shoring , and migration in the enlarged European Union" (presentation based on a set of four papers [zip])

Carsten Sprenger, "The Determinants of Ownership Costs after privatization: the case of Russia"

In a new data set of 530 Russian manufacturing firms we observe high and gradually decreasing ownership stakes of firm insiders, i.e. managers and workers. Using a tobit model with sample selection due to the privatisation decision, we estimate determinants of the ownership structure after privatisation. The paper provides empirical tests of the main predictions of the Aghion-Blanchard model of ownership choice after insider privatisation. For example, evidence is found that insider ownership serves as insurance against unemployment. The ability to collude among workers matters for the decision to sell shares to outsiders and affects positively the ownership stake of workers. Insiders are found to hold smaller stakes in the largest firms. Cash constraints matter in a negative sense: outsiders who are assumed to be less cash-constrained hold bigger stakes in capital-intensive firms.