Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2012
Abstract
In reaction to defaults on sovereign debt contracts, issuers and creditors have strengthened the terms in sovereign debt contracts that enable creditors to enforce their debts judicially and that enable sovereigns to restructure their debts. These apparently contradictory approaches reflect attempts to solve an incomplete contracting problem in which debtors need to be forced to repay debts in good states of the world; debtors need to be granted partial relief from debt payments in bad states; debtors may attempt to exploit divisions among creditors in order to opportunistically reduce their debt burden; debtors may engage in excessively risky activities using creditors' money; and debtors and creditors may attempt to externalize costs on the taxpayers of other countries. We support this argument with a statistical study of the development of sovereign bond terms from 1960 to the present.
Citation
Stephen J. Choi et al., The Evolution of Contractual Terms in Sovereign Bonds, 4 Journal of Legal Analysis 131-179 (2012)
Library of Congress Subject Headings
Public debts, Debt relief, Contracts--Interpretation and construction, Country risk, Empirical
Included in
Banking and Finance Law Commons, Contracts Commons, International Law Commons, Securities Law Commons
Available at: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scholarship/3979