Confronted with eroding market confidence in a country's debt obligations, what's a local politician to do? Major changes to fiscal policies are inevitably controversial back home. Securing financial support from multilateral official sector entities usually involves knuckling under to unpopular...

Constitutional constraints are often designed with crisis in mind: Framers wish to constrain the exercise of power precisely in those circumstances in which policymakers will be tempted to take actions that may violate underlying normative commitments. These constraints are only as strong as the...

English Abstract: There is a growing consensus that Venezuela will not be able to persist for much longer with its policy of full external debt service. The social costs are just too great. This implies a debt restructuring of some kind. Venezuela, principally through its state-owned oil...

Constitutions often contain rules that are meant to constrain the behavior of future governments during crises. Anti-discrimination rules and protections against expropriation of private property are classic examples. But when crisis hits, politicians are typically tempted by their short-run...

For multiple decades, activists have sought to institute an international legal regime that limits the ability of despotic governments to borrow money and then shift those obligations onto more democratic successor governments. Our goal in this article is to raise the possibility of an alternate...

The standard paradigm of contracting assumes that parties will revise subsequent contracts if a court interpretation of a clause does not reflect their intent. This assumption, however, often does not match behavior –- particularly in boilerplate contracts. We examine the aftermath of an...

A sovereign seeking to raise funds in the bond market may choose to issue the debt under either local or foreign parameters. This decision involves a tradeoff between the sovereign retaining discretion in managing the issue on the one hand and relinquishing control of the issue to third parties...

This article studies the impact of exogenous legal change on whether and how lawyers across four different deal types revise their contracts' governing law clauses in order to solve the problem that the legal change created. The governing law clause is present in practically every contract...

The definition of EBITDA is among the most important parts of a credit agreement. This concept matters to borrowers and creditors because it frequently determines whether a borrower is in breach of its covenants in the loan, and it matters to regulators because it determines the amount of...

Standard contract terms are “sticky”: they rarely change, even if change appears to be in the parties' interest. Multiple theories to explain stickiness do not reach consensus on its causes. We investigate the role of stickiness in sovereign bond contracts, where it would be especially...