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Full-Text Articles in Finance
King Leopold's Bonds And The Odious Debts Mystery, Joseph Blocher, Mitu Gulati, Kim Oosterlinck
King Leopold's Bonds And The Odious Debts Mystery, Joseph Blocher, Mitu Gulati, Kim Oosterlinck
Faculty Scholarship
In 1898, in the wake of the Spanish-American war, Spain ceded the colony of Cuba to the United States. In keeping with the law of state succession, the Spanish demanded that the U.S. also take on Spanish debts that had been backed by Cuban revenues. The Americans refused, arguing that some of those debts had been utilized for purposes adverse to the interests of the Cuban people. This, some argue, was the birth of the doctrine of “odious debts”; a doctrine providing that debts incurred by a non-representative government and utilized for purposes adverse to the population do not need …
Maduro Bonds, G. Mitu Gulati, Ugo Panizza
The Puzzle Of Pdvsa Bond Prices, Paolo Colla, Anna Gelpern, Mitu Gulati
The Puzzle Of Pdvsa Bond Prices, Paolo Colla, Anna Gelpern, Mitu Gulati
Faculty Scholarship
Market reports in the summer of 2016 suggest that Venezuela is on the brink of default on upwards of $65 billion in debt. That debt comprises of bonds issued directly by the sovereign and those issued by the state-owned oil company PDVSA. Based on the bond contracts and other legal factors, it is not clear which of these two categories of bonds would fare better in the event of a restructuring. However, market observers are convinced — and we agree — that legal and contractual differences would likely impact the payouts on the bonds if Venezuela defaults. Using a comparison …
Variation In Boilerplate: Rational Design Or Random Mutation?, Stephen J. Choi, Mitu Gulati, Robert E. Scott
Variation In Boilerplate: Rational Design Or Random Mutation?, Stephen J. Choi, Mitu Gulati, Robert E. Scott
Faculty Scholarship
Standard contract doctrine presumes that sophisticated parties choose their terminology carefully because they want courts or counterparts to understand what they intended. The implication of this “Rational Design” model of rational behavior is that courts should pay careful attention to the precise phrasing of contracts. Using a study of the sovereign bond market, we examine the Rational Design model as applied to standard-form contracting. In NML v. Argentina, federal courts in New York attached importance to the precise phrasing of the boilerplate contracts at issue. The industry promptly condemned the decision for a supposedly erroneous interpretation of a variant of …
A Sovereign’S Cost Of Capital: Go Foreign Or Stay Local, Michael Bradley, Irving Arturo De Lira Salvatierra, Mitu Gulati
A Sovereign’S Cost Of Capital: Go Foreign Or Stay Local, Michael Bradley, Irving Arturo De Lira Salvatierra, Mitu Gulati
Faculty Scholarship
A critical question faced by any sovereign seeking to raise funds in the bond market is whether to issue the debt under foreign or local parameters. This choice determines other key characteristics of any bond issue such as which banks, lawyers, and investors will be involved. Most important though, this decision involves a tradeoff between the sovereign retaining discretion in managing the issue and relinquishing control of the issue to third parties to prevent the sovereign from expropriating wealth from bondholders in the future. Based on a sample of 17,349 issuances by 117 sovereigns between 1990 and 2015, we investigate …
The Sovereign-Debt Listing Puzzle, Elisabeth De Fontenay, Josefin Meyer, Mitu Gulati
The Sovereign-Debt Listing Puzzle, Elisabeth De Fontenay, Josefin Meyer, Mitu Gulati
Faculty Scholarship
The claim that stock exchanges perform certification and monitoring roles in securities offerings is pervasive in the legal and financial literatures. This article tests the validity of this “bonding hypothesis” in the sovereign-bond market—one of the oldest and largest securities markets in the world. Using data on sovereign-bond listings for the entire post-World War II period, we provide the first comprehensive report on sovereigns’ historical listing patterns. We then test whether a sovereign bond issue’s listing jurisdiction affects its yield at issuance, as the bonding hypothesis would predict. We find little evidence of bonding in today’s sovereign-debt market. Instead, we …
The Gathering Storm: Restructuring Sovereign Contingent Liabilities, Lee C. Buchheit, Mitu Gulati
The Gathering Storm: Restructuring Sovereign Contingent Liabilities, Lee C. Buchheit, Mitu Gulati
Faculty Scholarship
The contingent liabilities of a sovereign, such as guarantees of the debts of third parties, can normally be kept off the balance sheet of the sovereign guarantor. That is their charm. As the debt to GDP ratios of many developed countries approach red-zone levels, contingent liabilities are increasingly being favored over direct, on-the-balance-sheet, borrowings.
But what happens if a country carrying large contingent liabilities needs to restructure its debt? The borrower dare not leave its contingent claims out of the restructuring. To do so would risk undermining the financial predicates of the sovereign’s economic recovery program should the beneficiaries of …
Odious, Not Debt, Anna Gelpern
Odious, Not Debt, Anna Gelpern
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This article argues that the doctrine of Odious Debt, which has enjoyed a revival since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, frames the problem of odious debt in a way that excludes most of the problematic obligations incurred by twentieth-century despots. Advocacy and academic literature traditionally describe the odious debt problem as one of government contracts with private creditors. Most theories of sovereign debt key off the same relationship. But in the latest crop of cases, including Iraq, Liberia, and Nigeria, private creditors represent a small fraction of the old regime's debts. Most of the creditors are other governments …