An examination of sovereign defaults over the long term, from 1294 to 2008, shows that serial defaults are far rarer than the much-ballyhooed experience of the 1980s suggests. the only mass default in Europe since 1294 took place in the early nineteenth century during the Napoleonic Wars. The...

The Confederate States of America floated two small bond issues in Europe during the American Civil War; cotton bonds that traded primarily in England and junk bonds in Amsterdam. The Confederacy serviced the cotton bonds for the duration of the war and defaulted on the junk bond issue....

It is generally very difficult to measure the effects of a currency depreciation on a country's balance sheet and financing costs given the endogenous properties of the exchange rate. History provides at least one natural experiment to test whether an exogenous exchange rate depreciation can be...