EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Seniority Structure of Sovereign Debt

Mark Wright

No 928, 2018 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: We study the implicit seniority structure of sovereign debt, using new data on missed payments (arrears) towards six types of external creditors. The data reveal a clear pecking order of sovereign debt repayment and default. As expected, at the top are multilateral ocial creditors such as the IMF and the World Bank, who are least likely to be defaulted upon. Surprisingly, bilateral ocial creditors are junior to sovereign bondholders, especially in the period after 1990. Most junior are commercial banks and trade creditors. This pecking order is conrmed after controlling for a country's debt structure, economic fundamentals, and time and country xed eects. The seniority structure also holds when studying the outcome of sovereign debt restructurings, by comparing creditor losses (haircuts) on private and ocial external debt: On average, private creditors face signicantly lower haircuts than ocial creditors. Our results pose a challenge for the theoretical literature on sovereign debt.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Working Paper: The seniority structure of sovereign debt (2019) Downloads
Working Paper: The Seniority Structure of Sovereign Debt (2019) Downloads
Working Paper: The Seniority Structure of Sovereign Debt (2019) Downloads
Working Paper: The Seniority Structure of Sovereign Debt (2019) Downloads
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:red:sed018:928

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2018 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:red:sed018:928