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...

In the wake of the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, the European financial authorities announced last November that all Eurozone sovereign bonds issued after mid-2013 must contain an identical collective action clause (CAC) in order, if necessary, to facilitate a restructuring of those...

The claim that lawyers act as gatekeepers or certifiers in financial transactions is widely discussed in the legal literature. There has, however, been little empirical examination of the claim. In this article, we test the hypothesis that law firms have replaced investment banks as the...

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

The claim that lawyers act as gatekeepers or certifiers in financial transactions is widely discussed in the legal literature. There has, however, been little empirical examination of the claim. We test the hypothesis that law firms have replaced investment banks as the gatekeepers of the market...

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