This paper surveys recent economic and legal literature on sovereign debt in light of the COVID-19 shock. Most of the core theoretical contributions we review across the two disciplines hinge on immunity, and the sovereign borrower's consequent inability to commit to repay foreign creditors, as...

Political support for Argentina's currency board rested on distributing the early gains from ending hyper-inflation and the spending made possible with access to external credit. When these gains were exhausted and external shocks left the peso overvalued, neither Argentina's political system...

Six years after starting the banking union, the European Union has reiterated its members' commitment to "make further concrete progress on the Banking Union by the end of the year" (Donohoe 2020). EU officials are right not to let Covid-19 derail necessary debates over this objective. But the...

Has the biggest sovereign debt default in history passed without answering the urgent legal and policy questions it posed, and with barely a ripple in the global financial markets? So far, pretty much. Lawsuits have not yielded a penny for the creditors. They failed to stop the spring 2005 debt...

Sovereign wealth funds – state-controlled transnational portfolio investment vehicles – began as an externally imposed category in search of a definition. SWFs from different countries had little in common and no particular desire to collaborate. But SWFs as a group implicated the triple...

In November 2006 Wal-Mart's Mexican subsidiary received approval to open a bank. The application faced little opposition in Mexico, unlike the company's failed effort to start a bank in the United States. This was partly because in Mexico, Wal-Mart's entry was generally regarded as increasing...