Since February 2003 a number of debtor countries have issued bonds with collective action clauses (CACs) under New York law - a development welcomed by the official sector as tangible progress towards more orderly crisis resolution. Not all of these countries, however, have opted for the same...

Avoiding the broader output losses to their economy is likely to be the key reason why governments avoid debt crises. Despite this, there has been little work that seeks to quantify output losses associated with such crises. This paper seeks to fill this gap. We find that debt crisis episodes...

One of the most important policy issues for financial authorities is to decide at what level average capital charges should be set. The decision may alternatively be expressed as the choice of an appropriate survival probability for representative banks over a horizon such as a year, often...

Over the past few years there has been an active debate among policy-makers on appropriate mechanisms for restructuring sovereign debt, particularly international bonds. In this paper a simple theoretical model is developed to analyse the merits of these proposals. The analysis suggests that...

This paper assesses the cross-country 'stylised facts' on empirical measures of the losses incurred during periods of banking crises. Firstly, the direct resolution costs to the government are considered, and then the broader costs to the welfare of the economy (proxied by losses in GDP). The...

A number of dealership markets share three common features: customer-dealer trades remain undisclosed, inter-dealer trading forms a substantial part of total trading and dealers have a choice, when dealing with each other, between doing so directly and using an inter-dealer broker (IDB). Using a...

This paper investigates the effects of stamp duty - the UK securities transaction tax - on the level and volatility of equity prices. The authors examine the response of the equity market to announcements of changes in stamp duty rates and compare the prices of two assets which are similar in...

This paper contributes to the empirical market microstructure literature on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) by producing model-based estimates of the spread and its components. The paper applies the same approach to test for changes in the determinants of price formation following the January...

This paper assesses various crisis resolution proposals using a theoretical model of (liquidity and solvency) crisis. The model suggests that payments standstills and last-resort lending are equally efficient means of dealing with liquidity crises, while coordinated lending through creditor...

This paper is a detailed study of trading patterns in the gilt market - based on all transactions in three gilts (6% Treasury 1999, 9 1/2% Treasury 2005, and 2 1/2% Index-linked 2016) from October 1993 to October 1994. The main finding of the paper is that order flow in the gilt market does not...