Contrary to widespread expectation, debt renegotiations in the era of bond finance have generally been quick and involved little litigation. We present a model that rationalizes the initial fears and offers interpretations for why they did not materialize. When the exchange offer is sufficiently...

This paper estimates bond-by-bond ""haircuts""-realized investor losses-in recent debt restructurings in Russia, Ukraine, Pakistan, Ecuador, Argentina, and Uruguay. We consider both external and domestic retructurings. Haircuts are computed as the percentage difference between the present values...

This paper surveys early intellectual antecedents of the Krueger (2001) proposal for creating bankruptcy reorganization procedures at the international level. We focus on actual proposals for new procedures made from the late 1970s up to an influential lecture by Sachs (1995), with brief...

This paper surveys the literature on sovereign debt from the perspective of understanding how sovereign debt differs from privately issue debt, and why sovereign debt is deemed safe in some countries but risky in others. The answers relate to the unique power of the sovereign. One the one hand,...