Conference on Macroeconomic Policies and Poverty Reduction

• Author: Catherine Pattillo
• Pages: 12-13

Page 12

Aid and Debt

Odious Debt

Michael Kremer and Seema Jayachandran (Harvard University)

Discussant: Raquel Fernandez (New York University)

Aid and Fiscal Management

Ales Bulír and Timothy Lane (IMF)

Discussant: Alberto Alesina (Harvard University)

Trade and Inequality

Trade Reforms and Income Inequality in Colombia

Orazio Attanasio (University College London), Pinelopi Goldberg (Yale University), and Nina Pavcnik (Dartmouth College)

Discussant: T.N. Srinivasan (Yale University)

Finance and Poverty

Safety Nets and Financial Institutions in the Asian Crisis: The Allocation of Within-Country Risk

Robert Townsend (University of Chicago)

Discussant: Abhijit Banerjee (MIT)

Do Rural Banks Matter? Evidence from the Indian Social Banking Experiment

Robin Burgess (London School of Economics) and Rohini Pande (Columbia University)

Discussant: Jonathan Morduch (New York University)

Poverty and Distributional Effects of Crises and Large Shocks

Financial Crises, Poverty, and Income Distribution

Emanuele Baldacci, Luiz de Mello, and Gabriela Inchauste (IMF)

Discussant: Ceclia Garc´ia-Peñalosa (GREQAM)

Growth, Shocks, and Poverty During Economic Reform: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia

Stefan Dercon (Oxford University)

Discussant: Angus Deaton (Princeton University)

Crises and Political Economy of Safety Nets

Economic Shocks, Wealth, and Welfare

Elizabeth Frankenberg (UCLA), James P. Smith (RAND), and Duncan Thomas (UCLA)

Discussant: François Bourguignon (World Bank)

Who Is Protected? Theory and Evidence on the Incidence of Fiscal Expansions and Contractions

Martin Ravallion (World Bank)

Discussants: Michael Keen (IMF) and Lant Pritchett (Harvard University-JFK School of Government)

Kremer and Jayachandran argue that sovereign debt, incurred without the consent of the people and to benefit the elite, should be considered odious and that successor governments should not be responsible for repayment. In a sovereign debt model, they show how an international institution, in denouncing a regime as odious, could create an equilibrium whereby creditors would stop odious lending because successor governments would not be held responsible or suffer a reputational penalty by refusing to repay the debt. If the institution declared debt odious ex ante of the debt being incurred, and by a supermajority, potential problems of alleged favoritism to debtors by the institution and possible drying up of the...