Documents Westermann, Frank 2 results

"The share of public debt that is held by lenders with preferred creditor status (i.e. the IMF, ECB, ESM, etc.) has increased substantially during Europe's sovereign debt crisis. Empirically, we document in both macro and survey data that there exists a close relationship between the increase in senior tranche lending and the interest rates of countries in crisis. With regard to policy implications, we point out a predicament that policymakers are facing: while aiming to stabilize interest rates at a reasonable level, providing further senior loans might achieve just the opposite, as private markets are gradually pushed into a junior position."

"Occasional crises have been shown to be part of growth enhancing mechanism (see Rancière, Tornell and Westermann, 2008). In this paper, we document that neither the stereotypical case study of India vs. Thailand, nor the benchmark growth-regression in this earlier research support this result anymore when updating the sample by one decade that includes the Global Financial Crisis, 2007/8. We analyze the time-varying nature of this relationship in rolling regressions and an historical dataset. In the subset of countries with enforceability problems, we find that the link between occasional crisis, measured by the negative skewness of credit growth, and per-capita output growth still remains intact."