The pari passu clause in sovereign bond contracts has spawned an improbably huge academic literature and a fast-growing jurisprudence, culminating in recent U.S. federal court decisions, which used the clause to block payments on nearly $30 billion in Argentinian debt. The academic literature,...

Two complainants brought a constitutional complaint before the German Constitutional Court. The complaint was directed against a judgement of the Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) that dismissed their action because the Hellenic Republic enjoyed state immunity before the German...

We study the daily yields on Irish land bonds listed on the Dublin Stock Exchange during the years 1920–1938. We exploit Irish events during the period and structural differences in land bonds to tease out a measure of investors׳ credibility in a UK sovereign guarantee. Using Ireland׳s...

The 1953 London Debt Agreement settled Germany's debts from the period between the two world wars and allowed the country to re-establish its role in international capital markets. The Agreement wrote down the overall debt by about 50 percent, gave the debtors a much longer period to repay, and...

This paper explores how selective default expectations affect the pricing of sovereign bonds in a historical laboratory: the German default of the 1930s. We analyze yield differentials between identical government bonds traded across various creditor countries before and after bond market...

The 1953 London Debt Agreement settled Germany's debts from the period between the two world wars, and allowed the country to re-establish its role in international capital markets. The Agreement wrote-down the overall debt by about 50 percent and gave the debtors a much longer period to repay....

The likely substantial impact of Covid-19 related measures on the public finances of European countries has prompted an unprecedented call for new and significant policies at a European level to alleviate the pressures on individual member states. The administrative closures adopted across a...

We investigate how internal distribution motives can interfere with the economic objectives of capital controls. In order to do this, we provide a model showing that elite capture can affect optimal debt repatriations and the management of official reserves under capital controls. Relying on...

What is called 'capitalism' is best understood as a series of stages. Industrial capitalism has given way to finance capitalism, which has passed through pension fund capitalism since the 1950s and a US-centered monetary imperialism since 1971, when the fiat dollar (created mainly to finance US...