Donor herding and domestic debt crisis

Abstract

This article presents a new model based on the loan-pushing model by Basu (1991) to show how a domestic debt crisis can occur in a low-income country following donor herding. The model focuses on the rational herding behaviour of donors due to payoff and information externalities. Although there are many theoretical models on herding behaviour, these models have not formally considered the relationship between donor herding and domestic debt crisis in a low-income country. This article is an attempt to fill this gap. The article shows that due to donor herding behaviour a domestic debt crisis can occur once the actual debt level is above the desirable one.