The defaults of Philip II have attained mythical status as the origin of sovereign debt crises. The king failed to honour his debts four times during his reign. In this paper, we reassess the fiscal position of Habsburg Spain. New archival evidence allows us to derive comprehensive estimates of...

By their extreme nature, repudiations rarely occur. History is therefore crucial to analyze their impact on bond prices. This paper provides an empirical study based on an original database: prices of a Tsarist bond traded in Paris before and after its repudiation by the Soviets. A structural...

Time series of daily data for Greek sovereign risk have been compiled and analysed statistically to shed light on the way that historical events, including political and institutional changes, determined the creditworthiness of the Greek government on the London stock market from the start of...

The severity of the Great Depression in Germany has sometimes been blamed on reparations in simplistic fashion. Alternative interpretations relied on American capital exports, the demise of the Gold Standard, or on malfunctions of the domestic economy, such as excessive wage increases during the...

Exploiting an exceptional historical example, this paper proposes an original method to address the existence of sovereign creditor moral hazard. As the coronas which are observable only during a total eclipse of the sun, market-specific prices of repudiated bonds are observable only when...

Based on an original database, this paper provides an empirical study of Tsarist bond prices reactions after their repudiation by the Soviets. For the two years following the repudiation two striking features of a representative Tsarist bond traded in Paris are highlighted: first, the price...

By their extreme nature, repudiations rarely occur. History is therefore crucial to analyze their impact on bond prices. This paper provides an empirical study based on an original database: prices of a Tsarist bond traded in Paris before and after its repudiation by the Soviets. A structural...

The 1953 London Debt Agreement settled Germany's debts from the period between the two world wars, and allowed the country to re-establish its role in international capital markets. The Agreement wrote-down the overall debt by about 50 percent and gave the debtors a much longer period to repay....

Prices of repudiated bonds are insightful but scarcely observed. Based on an original daily database, this paper compares the price evolution from January 6, 1916 to August 31, 1919 of a cross-listed (Paris and London) Tsarist bond repudiated by the Soviets on February 8, 1918. After its...