China's lending boom to developing countries is morphing into defaults and debt distress. Given the secrecy surrounding China's loans, also the associated defaults remain "hidden”, as missed payments and restructuring details are not disclosed. This paper constructs an encompassing dataset of...

It is easy to say that the International Monetary Fund should not resort to financial rescue for countries in crisis; this is hard to do when there is no alternative. That is where collective action clauses come in. Collective action clauses are designed to facilitate debt restructuring by the...

Controlling for bond and issuer characteristics, bond spreads are expected to be equal across different legal jurisdictions, and differences are expected to disappear through arbitrage. However, an analysis of 435 U.S. dollar–denominated bonds issued by 53 emerging market sovereigns during...

Using the universe of all externally issued bonds by corporates and sovereigns in emerging and developing economies during 2000-14, this paper analyzes various issuance trends, including the unprecedented post-crisis surge. The paper focuses on external issuance at the country-industry and...

This paper focuses on developments in the European Economic and Monetary Union sovereign debt markets in the past decade. The first part analyzes the integration and segmentation structure of the bond markets of the Economic and Monetary Union before and after the sovereign debt crisis, by...

Foreign investors are increasingly important participants in the local currency sovereign bond markets of developing countries. This note provides context on the overall growth of local currency sovereign debt markets in emerging markets and the growth of foreign investor participation in these...

This paper reviews the published work on the governance of regulatory authorities in order to identify the basic governance standards that apply and some of the factors that affect the implementation of good governance. There are four pillars of good regulatory governance: independence,...

More than 20 developing countries do not publish any data on their sovereign debt. In those that do disclose data, public debt statistics usually do not comply with international standards in terms of coverage and definitions. Some information can be deduced through indirect disclosure of debt...

This paper studies external sovereign bonds as an asset class. It compiles a new database of 266,000 monthly prices of foreign-currency government bonds traded in London and New York between 1815 (the Battle of Waterloo) and 2016, covering up to 91 countries. The main insight is that, as in...