This volume offers two important contributions to the literature on sovereign debt. First, it provides a unique genealogy of debt collection practices in terms of their availability, acceptability and efficacy. We argue that creditors’ tactics and methods to enforce debt repayment emerged and...

This paper offers a theory of conditionality lending in 19th century international capital markets. We argue that ownership of reputation signals by prestigious banks rendered them able and willing to monitor government borrowing. Monitoring was a source of rent, and it led bankers to support...

We provide a comparison of salient organizational features of primary markets for foreign government debt over the very long run. We focus on output, quality control, information provision, competition, pricing, charging, and signaling. We find that the market setup experienced a radical...

We provide a comparison of salient organizational features of primary markets for foreign government debt over the very long run. We focus on output, quality control, information provision, competition, pricing, charging and signaling. We find that the market set up experienced a radical...