Sovereign Debt Restructurings: An Overview of the Empirical Literature

Abstract

Emerging markets (EMs) and low-income countries (LIC) have experienced sovereign debt restructurings over decades. Moreover, sovereign default and restructurings are not only prominent in EMs and LICs, but also in advanced markets (AMs). With this background, we provide a survey of recent growing empirical literature on sovereign debt restructurings. We review four major streams of literature: (i) country case studies, (ii) private external debt restructurings, (iii) official external debt restructurings, and (iv) domestic debt restructurings. These streams of literature are completely complementary, and together cover the leading-edge issues in the area of sovereign debt.