Does Strengthening Collective Action Clauses (CACs) Help?

We study the effect of strengthening CACs in a debt rollover model of a sovereign debt crisis. Conditional on default, there are multiple equilibria: the impact of strengthening CACs depends critically on the prevailing equilibrium. For a subset of equilibria, (i) given a fixed number of creditors, we derive an optimal CAC threshold and (ii) given a fixed CAC threshold, as the number of creditors becomes larger, we show a convergence to efficient information aggregation. Moreover, strengthening CACs may actually increase the ex ante probability of adverse shock. Our analysis makes the case for a formal sovereign bankruptcy procedure.