Mainstream policy discussions take as given that the United States will and must pay its debts in full and on time, and that restructuring is legally and politically impossible. In our judgment, this assumption is unwarranted. Far from being unthinkable, under some circumstances restructuring...

We use longitudinal methods and universal panel data on 30,000 initially state-owned manufacturing firms in four transition economies to estimate the impacts of privatization on employment and wages. The results in all four countries consistently reject job losses and they never imply large wage...