Do the Secondary Markets Believe in Life After Debt?

This paper employs panel-data econometric techniques to explore the relations between measures of credit worthiness and the debt discounts on the secondary markets. It investigates empirically whether the secondary market discounts reflect a history of past repayments problems or whether they anticipate future debt crises. The answer to this question has implications about the desirability of debt relief. The main finding is that the secondary markets do not seem rapidly to absorb economic information, which suggests that they are still in their evolutionary stage and are not very efficient. The estimated models are also used to analyze issues in the international finance literature.