The latest Argentinean debt restructuring was the first time the resolution of a modem financial crisis was completely handed over to the private financial markets without official intervention by public institutions. We argue that the resulting harshest haircut for private creditors in history...

Russia's foreign debt problems worsened substantially after the financial crisis of 1998. The paper focuses on the key role of the government in servicing foreign debt and promoting institution building by showing how foreign debt influences the choice between official and unofficial taxation....

How costly are sovereign debt crises? In this paper we study output losses during sovereign default and debt renegotiation episodes since 1980. In contrast to previous work, we account for the severity of default and not only for its occurrence. Specifically, we distinguish between "hard" and...