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 the history of private limited liability companies (PLLCs) to challenge two pervasive assumptions in the literature: (1) Anglo-American legal institutions were better for economic development than continental Europe’s civil-law institutions; and (2) the corporation was the superior form...