The language and techniques of multiyear restructing of sovereign debt: Lessons from the Mexican experience

While many economists assure that the restructing of sovereign external debt is a straightforward matter, there are many practical details that bankers must address in negotiating a deal. The problems are compounded in a multiyear restructing, where a new frame of reference had to be established for the problem of debt restructing, including new concepts for included and excluded debt, various schedule for amortizations, monitoring, and conditionality procedures, and pricing considerations. The end result achieved for Mexico can be used as starting point for other debt restructing discussions, at least from a technical point of view.     

Political assessment by international firms: Models or methodologies?

Political risk is defined in terms of managerial contingencies arising from political events and processes. A number of “first-generation” assessment methodologies are reviewed and compared in terms of their degree of structure (explicit model of process) and systemization (formalization of methodology). The paper concludes that, at this point, effective political assessment is more likely to result from explicit specification of causal relationships and implementation of systematic analytical procedures than from development of increased methodological sophistication or elegance.     

Alternative specifications of the demand for money and their implications for forecasting and policy analysis with large macroeconomic models

The demand for money is an important function in large macroeconomic models because of its central role in monetary policy. The interest rate responsiveness of money demand determines the interest rate changes consistent with the initial change in monetary policy and the subsequent changes on aggregate demand and the price level. This paper uses the DRI macroeconometric model to investigate these issues, finding that the model's predictive power and its estimates of the relative potency of monetary and fiscal policy are dependent upon the specification of the money demand function.     

What's really new about policy modeling? An assessment on the basis of the U.S. federal government experience

This article is an attempt to look at where policy modeling is today in reality as opposed to where it is often perceived to be by those who are its proponents. To do this, an impressionistic survey is made of the state of the art, looking at such factors as model theory, structure, data, validation, and uses. Finally, some effort is made to take the results of this examination and use the conclusions reached to suggest what the future of policy modeling might be and what yet unexplored avenues remain to the model builders and users.     

Comments on Montague J. Lord's “distributional effects of international commodity price stabilization: Do the aggregate gains apply to individual producing countries?” [JPM 3:61–75 (1981)]

Lord discusses the impact of international commodity price stabilization on Latin American producing country export revenues. He correctly emphasizes that the directions and magnitudes of such effects may vary substantially across producers, depending on the degree of segmentation of the commodity markets and the nature and distribution of the shocks. However his potential contribution may be lost because of a number of inaccuracies, which I discuss under three general topics.