The 2007 Report on Economic and Social Progress in Latin America analyzes the nature and evolution of sovereign debt in Latin America and discusses the policies that can be followed by countries and international financial institutions (IFIs) to reduce the vulnerabilities associated with it....

The 2007 Report on Economic and Social Progress in Latin America analyzes the nature and evolution of sovereign debt in Latin America and discusses the policies that can be followed by countries and international financial institutions (IFIs) to reduce the vulnerabilities associated with it....

There are three reasons for attempting to reach a common understanding of the responsibilities of sovereign borrowers and their lenders. First, the flow of capital to sovereign debtors is exceptionally important to the world economy. Industrialized countries rely on it to finance their budget...

The external debt of emerging market sovereign borrowers is now mainly in the form of bonds held by numerous institutional and individual bondholders. Many of these bonds are governed by the law of the state of New York. As a matter of drafting convention, bonds for sovereign issuers governed by...

In many job settings, there will be some promotion criteria that are less amenable to measurement than others. Often, what is difficult to measure is more important. For example, possessing "good judgment" under pressure may be a better predictor of success as a law firm partner than the ability...

For over a decade, contracts literature has focused on standardization. Scholars asked how terms become standard, and why they change so rarely. This line of inquiry painted a world where a standard term persists until it is dislodged by another standard term, perhaps after a brief window of...

In this article, we combine two sources of data to shed light on the nature of transactional legal work. The first consists of stories about contracts that circulate widely among elite transactional lawyers. Surprisingly, the stories portray lawyers as ineffective market actors who are...

This essay highlights a phenomenon that has no place in the conventional theory of sophisticated business contracts: the term that makes no sense as an enforceable promise, one that defies functional explanation, one that drafters blush to rationalize in retrospect or chalk up to honest mistake....

Default on sovereign debt is a form of political risk. Issuers and creditors have responded to this risk both by strengthening the terms in sovereign debt contracts that enable creditors to enforce their debts judicially and by creating terms that enable sovereigns to restructure their debts....