Beneficial Delays in Debt Restructuring Negotiations

Abstract

Delays in debt restructuring negotiations are commonly observed and are widely regarded as costly and inefficient. This paper argues, however, that delays can be beneficial in that they allow the economy to recover from a crisis and make more resources available to settle the defaulted debt. As a result, the negotiating parties can be better off by waiting and then dividing a larger "cake." To examine whether this argument can explain the observed length of delays in the recent debt restructurings, this paper constructs a dynamic model of sovereign default in which debt renegotiation is modeled as a stochastic bargaining game based on Merlo and Wilson's (1995) framework. Quantitative analysis shows that this model can generate an average delay length comparable to that experienced by Argentina in its most recent debt restructuring.