Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(261)
- Faculty Publications (104)
- April 2017 (Revised February 2020)
- Case
Restructuring Ukraine
By: Kristin Mugford, Seema Amble and Tian Feng
In June 2015, Ukraine found itself struggling with a volatile and devalued currency, dramatically diminished foreign reserves, and a projected financing shortfall of $40 billion. Ukraine’s new government sought to return the nation to stability following political... View Details
Keywords: Exchange Rates; Politics; Macroeconomics; Financial Crisis; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Restructuring; Economy; Currency Exchange Rate; Banks and Banking; Economic Slowdown and Stagnation; Bonds; Sovereign Finance; Capital Markets; Credit; Debt Securities; Financial Liquidity; Financial Markets; Government and Politics; Ukraine
- Article
Market Reactions to Sovereign Litigation
By: Faisal Z. Ahmed and Laura Alfaro
Recent rulings in the ongoing litigation over the pari passu clause in Argentinian sovereign debt instruments have generated considerable controversy. Some official-sector participants and academic articles have suggested that the rulings will disrupt or impede... View Details
- March 2017 (Revised June 2019)
- Case
Mubadala and EBX: To X or to X It?
By: Nori Gerardo Lietz, Ricardo Andrade and Sayiddah Fatima McCree
In April 2012, Mubadala, Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund invested $2 billion in Brazilian conglomerate EBX, believing the company to be undervalued by the public markets. Shortly thereafter, however, EBX and its multiple business lines began to spiral downward. Hani... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Fiscal Rules and Sovereign Default
By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk
Recurrent concerns over debt sustainability in emerging and developed nations have prompted renewed debate on the role of fiscal rules. Their optimality, however, remains unclear. We provide a quantitative analysis of fiscal rules in a standard model of sovereign debt... View Details
- June 2016
- Article
Local Currency Sovereign Risk
By: Wenxin Du and Jesse Schreger
We introduce a new measure of emerging market sovereign credit risk: the local currency credit spread, defined as the spread of local currency bonds over the synthetic local currency risk-free rate constructed using cross-currency swaps. We find that local currency... View Details
- February 2016
- Case
Debt and Democracy: The New York Constitutional Convention of 1846
By: David Moss and Dean Grodzins
On September 23, 1846, delegates to New York State's constitutional convention prepared to vote on a proposal that its principal proponent, Michael Hoffman, conceded would be “a serious change in our form of government.” The proposal would place tight restrictions on... View Details
- Editorial
How to Turn Around a Country
By: Paul Kazarian and George Serafeim
Change is hard. Especially trying to change an entire country and its public sector that consists of more than 650,000 employees and has an annual budget of approximately 80 billion euros. This is the case of Greece, once the fastest-growing eurozone country, which has... View Details
- August 2015
- Article
A Comparative-Advantage Approach to Government Debt Maturity
By: Robin Greenwood, Samuel G. Hanson and Jeremy C. Stein
We study optimal government debt maturity in a model where investors derive monetary services from holding riskless short-term securities. In a setting where the government is the only issuer of such riskless paper, it trades off the monetary premium associated with... View Details
- August 2015
- Article
Dollar Funding and the Lending Behavior of Global Banks
By: Victoria Ivashina, David S. Scharfstein and Jeremy C. Stein
A large share of dollar-denominated lending is done by non-U.S. banks, particularly European banks. We present a model in which such banks cut dollar lending more than euro lending in response to a shock to their credit quality. Because these banks rely on wholesale... View Details
- July 6, 2015
- Editorial
Lessons From Greece as Controversial Finance Minister Exits
By: George Serafeim
- March–April 2015
- Article
The Almighty Ruble
By: Debora L. Spar
At 1 AM Moscow time on December 16, Russia's central bank announced a massive hike in the country's interest rate, from 10.5% to 17%. It's not clear how Russian leader Vladimir Putin and his colleagues could realistically have expected to achieve anything by hiking the... View Details
- March 2015
- Article
Vulnerable Banks
By: Robin Greenwood, Augustin Landier and David Thesmar
We present a model in which fire sales propagate shocks across bank balance sheets. When a bank experiences a negative shock to its equity, a natural way to return to target leverage is to sell assets. If potential buyers are limited, then asset sales depress prices,... View Details
- October 2014 (Revised April 2018)
- Supplement
Creditor Activism in Sovereign Debt: Argentina vs. Holdout Investors (B)
By: Laura Alfaro, Gaurav Toshniwal and Hilary White
Keywords: Argentina; Debt; Debt Crisis; Debt Markets; Debt Repayment; Debt Restructuring; Government Bonds; Government Debt; Law; Default; Sovereign Debt; Sovereign Debt Crisis; Hedge Fund; Hedge Funds; Strategy; Bonds; Bond Risk; Debt Management; Borrowing and Debt; Governance; Macroeconomics; Economics; Economy; Government Legislation; Argentina; Latin America; United States
- October 2014
- Article
Sovereigns, Upstream Capital Flows and Global Imbalances
By: Laura Alfaro, Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan and Vadym Volosovych
We construct measures of net private and public capital flows for a large cross-section of developing countries considering both creditor and debtor side of the international debt transactions. Using these measures, we demonstrate that sovereign-to-sovereign... View Details
- June 2014
- Article
Frictions in Shadow Banking: Evidence from the Lending Behavior of Money Market Funds
By: Sergey Chernenko and Adi Sunderam
We document the consequences of money market fund risk taking during the European sovereign debt crisis. Using a novel data set of security-level holdings of prime money market funds, we show that funds with large exposures to risky Eurozone banks suffered significant... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
Financial Repression in the European Sovereign Debt Crisis
By: Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina
By the end of 2013, the share of government debt held by the domestic banking sectors of Eurozone countries was more than twice its 2007 level. We show that this type of increasing reliance on the domestic banking sector for absorbing government bonds generates a... View Details
- April 2013 (Revised February 2018)
- Case
Norway: The Embarrassment of Riches
By: Sophus A. Reinert, Forest Reinhardt and Senny Munthe-Kaas
In early 2013, Norway was by many accounts the world’s most developed country; it topped various indices for everything from democracy to happiness, had a comprehensive welfare state, and massive oil revenues endowed it with a substantial, and growing, Sovereign Wealth... View Details
- Spring 2013
- Article
The Investment Strategies of Sovereign Wealth Funds
By: Shai Bernstein, Josh Lerner and Antoinette Schoar
This paper examines the direct private equity investment strategies across sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) and their relationship to the funds' organizational structures. SWFs seem to engage in a form of trend chasing, since they are more likely to invest at home when... View Details
- November 2012 (Revised November 2013)
- Case
Persephone's Pomegranate: Crédit Agricole and Emporiki
By: Dante Roscini, Daniela Beyersdorfer and Jerome Lenhardt
In 2006 the French bank Crédit Agricole bought the Greek Emporiki bank, for €2.8 billion, at the peak of a bull market for bank takeovers. Six years, a major financial crisis, and €5.2 billion of losses later, in a context of great uncertainty in the European banking... View Details