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We introduce long-term debt (and a maturity choice) into a standard model of firm financing and investment. This allows us to study two distortions of investment: (1.) Debt dilution distorts firms' choice of debt which has an indirect effect on investment; (2.) Debt overhang directly distorts investment. In a dynamic model of investment, leverage, and debt maturity, we show that the two frictions interact to reduce investment, increase leverage, and increase the default rate. We provide empirical evidence from U.S. firms that is consistent with the model predictions. Using our model, we isolate and quantify the effect of debt dilution and debt overhang. Debt dilution is more important for firm value than debt overhang. Debt overhang can actually increase firm value by reducing debt dilution. The negative effect of debt dilution on investment is about half as strong as that of debt overhang. Eliminating the two distortions leads to an increase in investment equivalent to a reduction in the corporate income tax of 3.5 percentage points. ; The ADEMU Working Paper Series is being supported by the European Commission Horizon 2020 European Union funding for Research & Innovation, grant agreement No 649396.

Racial discrimination shapes who feels debt as a crushing burden and who experiences debt as an opportunity. U.S. financial products and rules, and the ways they're implemented, amplify this inequality along racial lines.

After the huge debt increases in the 1940s, due to the WWII, and in the 1980s due to the emerging markets' debt crises, the debt overhang problem is once again at the center of the academic and political debate because of the recent debt crisis that affected the European countries in 2009. The debt overhang theory explains how an high level of debt distorts the optimal investment decisions and reduces government's incentives, in the debtor country, to undertake the necessary "adjustment policies". A huge literature focuses on the negative effects deriving from a debt overhang condition. In particular, this kind of literature has been mostly used to describe and to study poor and less developed countries. Nowadays instead, the situation is quite different with the Greek case that represents a very peculiar and never experienced situation. Chapter 1 of the thesis starts with an introduction of the sovereign debt overhang problem. Then, since the aim is to study the possible policy interventions able to solve it, the focus is posed on sovereign debt restructuring as a resolution mechanism. A relief intervention can be considered, indeed, as a way to reduce the debt burden for a country struggling with an high level of debt. Descriptions of the restructuring process, of the macroeconomic consequences and of the Greek case are then provided in this chapter in addition to some stylised facts and an event analysis useful to communicate the main messages. In the past, several different strategies of debt restructuring have been implemented and the consequences they produced were often different case by case. It is then interesting to study the effectiveness of the several options that can be used to restructure public debt. For this reason, a very simple theoretical model is developed in Chapter 2 in order to study three different strategies that can be used to solve a sovereign debt overhang problem. In particular, two strategies are based on a debt restructuring process, via face value reduction or rescheduling, whereas a third one is based on conditional-additional official lending. This strategy relies on the idea that the debtor country can benefit of new lending from the official sector, in order to undertake a larger amount of investment. The aim of the model is to represent schematically the functioning of the three restructuring processes to gain insights into their differences and to study their consequences in term of incentives to invest in a "troubled country". An empirical evidence of the debt overhang hypothesis is then provided in Chapter 3. The combination of the sovereign debt crisis of 2009 and the fiscal consolidation policies implemented as a result, makes indeed interesting to study this hypothesis in Europe. The Chapter exploits then a panel dataset for the European countries, between 1995 and 2015, in order to examine the extent to which increased levels of public debt have led to reduced public investment. We start the analysis from basic POLS models and then we expand it gradually to FE, IV and GMM estimation models. The results validate the debt overhang hypothesis and remain robust across various model specifications.

Cover -- Contents -- 1 Introduction -- 2 A bare-bones model of sovereign debt crises -- 2.1 Optimal default and taxation plans under discretion -- 2.2 Debt pricing -- 2.3 Rational expectations equilibrium and regularity conditions -- 2.4 Equilibria -- 3 The effect of tranching when senior debt is riskless -- 3.1 A Modigliani-Miller irrelevance result -- 3.2 Non-neutrality -- 4 Risky senior debt -- 5 A numerical illustration -- 6 Conclusion -- 7 Appendix -- A Proofs of Propositions -- A.1 Proof of Proposition 1 -- A.2 Proof of Proposition 2 -- A.3 Proof of Proposition 3 -- A.4 Proof of Proposition 4 -- B Equilibria under tranching

Is the seniority structure of sovereign debt neutral for a government's decision between defaulting and raising surpluses? In this paper, we address this question using a model of debt crises where a discretionary government endogenously chooses distortionary taxation and whether to apply an optimal haircut to bondholders. We show that when the size of senior tranches is small, a version of the Modigliani-Miller theorem holds: tranching just redistributes government revenues from junior to senior bondholders, while taxes and government borrowing costs remain unchanged. However, as senior tranches become sufficiently large, default costs on senior debt transpire into a stronger commitment to repay not only the senior tranche, but also the junior one. We show that there is a lower threshold for senior bonds above which tranching can eliminate default on both junior and senior debt, and an upper threshold beyond which the government defaults also on senior debt. ; The ADEMU Working Paper Series is being supported by the European Commission Horizon 2020 European Union funding for Research & Innovation, grant agreement No 649396.

Indonesia has received external debt as an external source of finance to fill in the investment-saving gap in achieving economic growth to improve social welfare. Despite Indonesian economy is able to recover to some extent, based on Bank Indonesia (2018), Indonesia's external debt at the end of Q2/2018 still amounted to USD 355,7 billion; consisting of government and central bank external debt of USD 179.7 billion, as well as private sector (including state-owned enterprises) external debt of USD 176.0 billion. Therefore, this study aims to examine the trend and impact of external debt on economic growth in the context of Indonesia's economy. If external debt is found to lead to debt trap, or already in the condition of growth-led debt, its benefits for economic development should be reviewed properly and government policies regarding external debt need to be redesigned. This study is a qualitative research in the form of case study of External Debt and its critical impact in Indonesia. Through observation, data comparison and literature study, it is found that external debt of Indonesia has been dominated by US Dollar and Japanese Yen, which assumed to cause surge in debt repayment.

International debt rescheduling, both in earlier epochs and our present one, has been marked by a flurry of bargaining. In this process, significant variation has emerged over time and across cases in the extent to which debtors have undertaken economic adjustment, banks or bondholders have written down debts, and creditor governments and international organizations have intervened in negotiations. Debt Games develops and applies a situational theory of bargaining to analyze the adjustment undertaken by debtors and the concessions provided by lenders in international debt rescheduling. This approach has two components: a focus on each actor's individual situation, defined by its political and economic bargaining resources, and a complementary focus on changes in their position. The model proves successful in accounting for bargaining outcomes in eighty-four percent of the sixty-one cases, which include all instances of Peruvian and Mexican debt rescheduling over the last one hundred and seventy years as well as Argentine and Brazilian rescheduling between 1982 and 1994