Over the past decade, 14 countries have undertaken a total of 18 debt restructurings. Concerns surrounding some of these restructurings have led policymakers and capital market participants to review their policies and practices on restructuring sovereign debt. in particular, court rulings as a result of litigation against Argentina have raised fears that a small minority of creditors could blo...

The Greek restructuring of March 2012 illustrates how non-price contract terms can have a significant effect on the pricing of sovereign debt. In the Greek restructuring, bonds governed by local law suffered NPV haircuts in the range of 60-75%, whereas those bonds governed by foreign law were paid in full and on time. Other contract parameters such as the currency in which the debt is denominat...

nancial crises is one of the gravest threats to an open and liberal international economic order... Recent events in Turkey and Argentina demonstrate that financial crises with potentially profound consequences for economic and political stability are not a thing of the past. They also demonstrate the continued urgency of finding practical and concrete means to handle the crises that do occur.”...

This paper provides an empirical study of sovereign debt integration and analyses the evolution of sovereign debt prices when several countries merge to become a “unified country”, or when the probability of such an event exists. Based on an original database of pre-Italian Bonds, this paper shows the impact of Italy’s unification on the bond prices. Italy’s unification was a long lasting proce...

We build the network of the top 190 Italian quoted companies during the two financial crises of 2008-2009 (US credit crisis) and 2010-2011 (European sovereign debt crisis) and compare its structure to the pre-crises years, using both minimum spanning trees and the full network with thresholds. We also analyze the centrality and compactness of industry sectors. We find a general contraction of t...

Why do countries repay their debts? If countries in default have sufficient opportunities to save, Bulow and Rogoff [6] have shown that the answer cannot stem from a country’s desire to preserve a reputation for repayment. As a result, researchers have explained the existence of sovereign debt by either placing restrictions on the deposit contracts banks can offer, or by looking outside the cre...

In this paper, I study the determinants of credit spread changes of individual U.S. dollar denominated bonds – domestic and foreign sovereign – using fundamentals specified by structural models. Credit spreads are important determinants of the cost of debt for all issuers and are fully determined by credit risk in structural models. I construct a new dataset of domestic corporate and sovereign ...

What determines the sustainability of sovereign debt? In this paper, we develop a model where myopic governments seek electoral popularity but can nevertheless commit credibly to service external debt. They do not default when they are poor even though default costs are low because they would lose access to debt markets and be forced to reduce spending; they do not default when they become rich...