Governments often issue bonds in foreign jurisdictions, which can provide additional legal protection vis-á-vis domestic bonds. This paper studies the effect of this jurisdiction choice on bond prices. We test whether foreign-law bonds trade at a premium compared to domestic-law bonds. We use...

We study the occurrence of holdout litigation in the context of sovereign defaults. The number of creditor lawsuits against foreign governments has strongly increased over the past decades, but there is a large variation across crisis events. Why are some defaults followed by a "run to the...

Eine rechtzeitigere Restrukturierung der Staatsschulden Griechenlands wäre vorteilhaft gewesen - diese Beurteilung hat der Internationale Währungsfonds (IWF) im Frühjahr dieses Jahres abgegeben. Doch welche Lösungsansätze sind für eine frühe Schuldenrestrukturierung überhaupt denkbar?...

For centuries, defaulting governments were immune from legal action by foreign creditors. This paper shows that this is no longer the case. Building a dataset covering four decades, we find that creditor lawsuits have become an increasingly common feature of sovereign debt markets. The legal...

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...