The Seniority Structure of Sovereign Debt

Matthias Schlegl, Christoph Trebesch and Mark Wright

No 25793, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Sovereign governments owe debt to many foreign creditors and can choose which creditors to favor when making payments. This paper documents the de facto seniority structure of sovereign debt using new data on defaults (missed payments or arrears) and creditor losses in debt restructuring (haircuts). We overturn conventional wisdom by showing that official bilateral (government-to-government) debt is junior, or at least not senior, to private sovereign debt such as bank loans and bonds. Private creditors are typically paid first and lose less than bilateral official creditors. We confirm that multilateral institutions such as the IMF and World Bank are senior creditors.

JEL-codes: F3 F4 F5 G1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-opm
Note: EFG IFM ITI LE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25793.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The seniority structure of sovereign debt (2019)
Working Paper: The Seniority Structure of Sovereign Debt (2019)
Working Paper: The Seniority Structure of Sovereign Debt (2019)
Working Paper: The seniority structure of sovereign debt (2019)
Working Paper: The Seniority Structure of Sovereign Debt (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:25793

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25793

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().