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

This special issue is a cooperation of the Yale Journal of International Law and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). It emerged from UNCTAD's work on sovereign debt workouts, specifically from its Working Group on a Sovereign Debt Workout Mechanism (2013 to 2015)....

The pari passu clause in sovereign bond contracts has spawned an improbably huge academic literature and a fast-growing jurisprudence, culminating in recent U.S. federal court decisions, which used the clause to block payments on nearly $30 billion in Argentinian debt. The academic literature,...

Sovereign immunity has served as a partial substitute for bankruptcy protection, but it has encouraged a minority of creditors to pursue unorthodox legal remedies with spillover effects far beyond the debtor-creditor relationship. The attempt to enforce Argentina's pari passu clause in New York...

This essay describes fundamental flaws in the sovereign debt restructuring regime, but questions the prevailing arguments for sovereign bankruptcy. I conclude that efficient debt outcomes may well come about without bankruptcy, but that a statutory regime is necessary to achieve sovereign...

This article argues that essential information about sovereign debt must be publicly accessible and intelligible. Sovereign debt is a public institution, and sovereign debt statistics are a matter of public interest. For most stakeholders, information about sovereign debt is hard to find, harder...