June 2000 - Collective action clauses raise borrowing costs for low-rated borrowers and lower them for high-rated borrowers. This result holds for all developing country bonds and also for the subset of sovereign bond issuers. It is easy to say that the International Monetary Fund should not...

We examine the implications for borrowing costs of including collective-action clauses in loan contracts. For a sample of some 2,000 international bonds, we compare the spreads on bonds subject to UK governing law, which typically include collective-action clauses, with spreads on bonds subject...