International financial institutions (IFIs) generally enjoy preferred creditors treatment (PCT). Although PCT rarely appears in legal contracts, when sovereigns restructure bilateral or commercial debts, they normally pay IFIs in full. This paper presents a model where a creditor, such as an...

We use a new, comprehensive data set on the sovereign debt investor base to document three novel empirical facts: (i) sovereign debt is repatriated - that is, shifted from external private to domestic investors - prior to sovereign defaults; (ii) not all crises are equal: evidence for...

We study a model of equilibrium sovereign default in which the government issues cocos (contingent convertible bonds) that stipulate a suspension of debt payments when the government faces liquidity shocks in the form of an increase of the bondholders' risk aversion. We find that in spite of...

Quantitative models of sovereign debt predict that countries should default during deep recessions. However, empirical research on sovereign debt has found a surprisingly large share of "good times" defaults (i.e., defaults that happen when GDP is above trend). Existing evidence also indicates...

Sovereign debt crises are difficult to solve. This paper studies the "holdout problem", meaning the risk that creditors refuse to participate in a debt restructuring. We document a large variation in holdout rates, based on a comprehensive new dataset of 23 bond restructurings with external...

How should sovereign bailouts take account of the effects bailouts have on policy reforms? Conflicted recipient governments complicate bailout choices because some reforms that spur growth reduce rents that benefit government decision makers. Our model takes account of whether bailout generosity...

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...

According to the IMF, the current public debt makes up nearly 40 percent of the global debt, marking the highest share since the mid-1960s. Despite the vast research on alarming levels of sovereign default, the literature remains inconclusive. This paper investigates macroeconomic, financial,...

Sovereign debt crises are difficult to solve. This paper studies the "holdout problem", meaning the risk that creditors refuse to participate in a debt restructuring. We document a large variation in holdout rates, based on a comprehensive new dataset of 23 bond restructurings with external...

This paper argues that sovereign debt restructurings as agreed between defaulting states and their multilateral, bilateral, or private creditors constitute exercises of international public authority. Their authoritative character results from their effects on the citizens of the defaulting...