Default on sovereign debt is a form of political risk. Issuers and creditors have responded to this risk both by strengthening the terms in sovereign debt contracts that enable creditors to enforce their debts judicially and by creating terms that enable sovereigns to restructure their debts....

Conventional wisdom holds that boilerplate contract terms are ignored by parties, and thus are not priced into contracts. We test this view by comparing Greek sovereign bonds that have Greek choice-of-law terms and Greek sovereign bonds that have English choice-of-law terms. Because Greece can...

Contract terms that improve or reduce the likelihood of repayment of a debt should impact its price. That's basic economics. But what about a contract that is hundreds of pages long and has lengthy and complex terms that even the lawyers are unwilling to read? Believers in efficient markets...