I examine the change in prices of foreign sovereign dollar bonds over a two-week period in June 1930 that corresponds to the enacting of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs. I argue that if the market anticipated debt-repayment problems arising from the tariffs, this should be visible in bond prices. I...

Sovereign bonds are usually priced under the assumption that only the sovereign issuer may be responsible of their repayment. In some cases however, bondholders may legitimately expect to be repaid by more than one agent. For example, when a country breaks-up, successor states may agree to...

What is the connection between different forms of globalization, economic growth, and welfare? International trade, cross-border capital flows, and labor movements are three areas in which economic historians have focused their research. I critically summarize various measures of international...

How will sovereign debt markets evolve in the 21st century? We survey how the literature has responded to the eurozone debt crisis, placing “lessons learned” in historical perspective. The crisis featured: (i) the return of debt problems to advanced economies; (ii) a bank-sovereign...

We study the effects of international political stability on sovereign defaults and bank-sovereign nexus. We construct a novel index (IPS) that quantifies the course of international relations between 149 countries spanning 1840-2012. We show that countries with higher IPS scores are less likely...

Latin American access to international markets since the beginning of the 19th century has depended on the cyclical behavior of foreign indebtedness. This document studies Great Britain's cycles of boom and recession in international credit and Latin American participation on the international...

This paper complements the empirical literature on sovereign debt restructurings by analyzing potential determinants of (near-term) follow-up restructurings after a restructuring has taken place. The probability of follow-up restructurings is estimated by means of survival models using a unique...

The sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone has prompted a number of policy responses. Among the most significant is an initiative by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development to identify what it has termed “Principles of Responsible Sovereign Lending and Borrowing.” The...

Theoretical models have suggested that sanctions may be important for enforcing sovereign debt contracts (Bulow and Rogoff, 1989a, 1989b). This paper examines the role of sanctions in promoting debt repayment during the classical gold standard period. We analyze a wide range of sanctions...