En este trabajo reflexionamos sobre el papel que puede desempeñar la política fiscal en la solución a la crisis de la zona del euro, caracterizada por niveles de endeudamiento públicos y privados elevados, que se acompañan de problemas de crecimiento y de competitividad. Analizamos el caso...

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 recent financial woes of Greece and other nations are reinvigorating the debate over whether to bail out defaulting countries or, instead, restructure their debt. Bailouts are expensive, in the case of Greece costing potentially hundreds of billions of euros. But a bailout was virtually...

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....

Access to private capital markets is the most salient difference between emerging market economies and other developing countries. However, in contrast to developed economies, emerging markets have had a troubled relationship with capital fows. In particular, balance of payments and debt crises...

Standard economic theory suggests that capital should flow from rich countries to poor countries. However, capital has predominantly flowed to rich countries. The three essays in this dissertation attempt to explain this phenomenon. The first two essays suggest theoretical explanations for why...

Within the next few months, the Greek government, is supposed to persuade private creditors holding about EUR 200bn in its bonds to voluntarily exchange their existing bonds for new bonds that pay roughly 50 percent less. This may work with large creditors whose failure to participate in a debt...