During the European sovereign debt crisis of 2011-13, some nations faced with rising borrowing costs adopted commitments to treat bondholders as priority claimants. That is, if there was a shortage of funds, bondholders would be paid first. In this article, we analyze the prevalence and variety...

During the pandemic, public debt in Latin America and the Caribbean rose to more than 70 percent of GDP, and countries are now attempting to lower debt ratios. We analyze past debt reduction episodes and find inflation and the real interest rate were the most frequent main drivers, while higher...

This article introduces the Haitian Independence Debt of 1825 to the odious debt and sovereign debt literatures. We argue that the legal doctrine of odious debt is surprisingly and perhaps indefensibly narrow possibly because of historical contingency rather than any underlying logic or...

The paper shows that international government borrowing from multilateral development banks is countercyclical while international government borrowing form private sector lenders is procyclical. The countercyclicality of official lending is mostly driven by the behavior of the World Bank...

The paper shows that international government borrowing from multilateral development banks is countercyclical while international government borrowing form private sector lenders is procyclical. The countercyclicality of official lending is mostly driven by the behavior of the World Bank...

This paper uses the rules of engineering as a rhetorical device to discuss why the international financial architecture needs a structured mechanism for dealing with sovereign insolvency. The paper suggests that the most important problem with the status-quo relates to delayed defaults and...

This paper uses the rules of engineering as a rhetorical device to discuss why the international financial architecture needs a structured mechanism for dealing with sovereign insolvency. The paper suggests that the most important problem with the status-quo relates to delayed defaults and...

The global downturn caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has the potential to send more than half the nations around the globe into debt distress in the near future. As of this writing, nearly a hundred countries have approached the IMF for assistance. Many, perhaps most, of these countries will need...

Commonly used datasets on the level of public debt provide incomplete country and period coverage. This paper presents a new dataset that includes complete series of central government debt for 89 countries over the 1991-2005 period and for other 7 countries for the 1993-2005 period

Creditor countries and international organizations continue to disagree whether Greece should receive additional official debt relief, and if so how much. This paper first shows that these disagreements can be attributed to competing assumptions about Greece's future capacity to repay,...