Ep 75 - Reps for Repaying Debts: Overstated? (ft. Paolo Manasse, Matilde Faralli & Ugo Panizza)

The Value of Building a Reputation for Repaying Debts: Overstated? A foundational question about sovereign debt markets is why, given the difficulty of enforcing against a sovereign, do sovereigns ever repay? The answer most often given is reputation. Sovereigns repay because they want to borrow again in the future. And this belief in the immense long term benefits of repaying has become an article of faith for many in the business. But how does this belief hold up against the empirics? Or, as our guests on this episode – Paolo Manasse, Matilde Faralli and Ugo Panizza -- put it in a recent article (written with Francesa Caselli): What are the long term benefits of repaying when everyone else is defaulting? Their example is Columbia, widely thought to be the only large Latin American country that did not default during the 1980s. They find that Columbia benefited in the short and medium term from avoiding explicit default, but the benefit did not last the long term. Producer: Leanna Doty