"When the BIS was established in 1930 it had two purposes. The most obvious practical concern was to handle a narrowly technical issue: to create a painless or crisis-minimising method for making the transfer of German postwar reparations payments. But the new institution also had a more...

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...

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...