Three Essays on Intra-Creditor Coordination Failures in Sovereign Debt Restructuring
This work is comprised of three essays that attempt to contribute to the task of reviewing the prevailing (solely market-based) contractual approach for sovereign debt restructuring. These essays particularly focus on aspects of intra-creditor coordination. Although the content of these essays is interconnected, each unit is a stand-alone entity. Essay I: The latest Argentinean debt restructuring was the first time the resolution of a modern financial crisis was completely handed over to the private financial markets without official intervention by public institutions. This essay argues that the resulting harshest haircut for private creditors in history can be at least partially related to an assurance game played by creditors. It shows that incentive schemes provided by the Argentinean government were factors facilitating this haircut. The analysis suggests that, contrary to the recognition in the literature, the effects of Collective Action Clauses and Exit Consents within a restructuring process are not equal. In the case of Argentina, the inclusion of Collective Action Clauses in the defaulted bonds could have benefited the holdout creditors. Essay II: Experience from events of sovereign debt restructuring over the last decade shows that the prevailing process is mainly shaped by exchange-offers launched by the debtor. This suggests that negotiations for changing the repayment terms of the debt take place in an ultimatum game which centers virtually all bargaining power on the debtor side. Creditors vote according to reservations values that might be influenced by fairness consideration both vis-à-vis the debtor and their fellow creditors. And, as fairness is usually a highly subjective influence, this can result in a heterogeneity of reservation values which might impede effective intra-creditor coordination for the benefit of the debtor. Essay III: Mitigating intra-creditor coordination failures has always been crucial in any proposal for an institutionalized process of restructuring sovereign bonds. However, one source of failure in creditor coordination has not been taken into consideration. The current process of sovereign debt restructuring enables the debtor to launch an exchange offer which provides incentives to inter-temporally discriminate among creditors with different reservation values. Only a creditor representation that can effectively bind in all different creditor types will mitigate this failure and thereby prevent potential conflicts of interests among creditors. Enhancing the current proposal of creditor groups so that creditors can effectively pre-commit can shield the process from this kind of coordination failure. This essay concludes with a proposal for a creation of a creditor representation body which exhibits a similar mode of operation as a celebrated institutionalized creditor representation body in the penultimate century. To summarize the conclusions drawn from these essays, the contractual approach is not yet able to guarantee effective creditor coordination due to a lack of a comprehensive and forceful permanent creditor representation. Establishing such a permanent representation body would replicate the institutional development experienced during the last heydays of bonds as a source of emerging market financing. This would lead to a significant improvement in creditor coordination. Moreover, since the result of a potential debt restructuring draws back to the ex-ante lending decision by the individual investor, this improvement could contribute to the welfare-enhancing effects of external financing by private creditors for developing economies.
Umschuldungsverhandlungen, Koordinationsfehler, Vertraglicher Ansatz, Internationale Finanzarchitektur, Emerging Market Staatsanleihen, Sovereign Debt Restructuring, Coordination Failures, Contractual Approach, International Financial Architecture, Emerging Market Bonds
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