The management of financial crises in emerging markets is a vital and high-stakes challenge in an increasingly global economy. For this reason, it's also a highly contentious issue in today's public policy circles. In this book, leading economists-many of whom have also participated in policy...

We study sovereign external debt crises over the past 200 years, with a focus on creditor losses, or "haircuts". Our sample covers 327 sovereign debt restructurings with external private creditors over 205 default spells since 1815. Creditor losses vary widely (from none to 100%), but the...

Theory suggests that corporate and sovereign bonds are fundamentally different, also because sovereign debt has no bankruptcy mechanism and is hard to enforce. We show empirically that the two assets are more similar than you think, at least when it comes to high-yield bonds over the past 20...