This paper measures “debt disputes” between governments and foreign private creditors in periods of sovereign debt crises. We construct an index of government coerciveness, consisting of 9 objective sub-indicators. Each of these sub-indicators captures unilateral government actions imposed...

We study the occurrence of holdout litigation in the context of sovereign defaults. The number of creditor lawsuits against foreign governments has strongly increased over the past decades, but there is a large variation across crisis events. Why are some defaults followed by a “run to the...

We show that political booms, measured by the rise in governments’ popularity, predict financial crises above and beyond other better-known early warning indicators, such as credit booms. This predictive power, however, only holds in emerging economies. We show that governments in emerging...

Human trafficking is a humanitarian problem of global scale, but quantitative research on the issue barely exists. This paper is the first attempt to analyze the economics of human trafficking and labour migration based on micro data, using unique household surveys from Belarus, Bulgaria,...

The Greek debt restructuring of 2012 stands out in the history of sovereign defaults. It achieved very large debt relief - over 50\% of 2012 GDP - with minimal financial disruption, using a combination of new legal techniques, exceptionally large cash incentives, and official sector pressure on...

A main puzzle in the sovereign debt literature is that defaults have only minor effects on subsequent borrowing costs and access to credit. This paper comes to a different conclusion. We construct the first complete database of investor losses (\"haircuts\") in all restructurings with foreign...