restructurings, or those involving official creditors such as government-to-government debts (see Reinhart and Trebesch (2016) and Schlegl, Trebesch, and Wright (2019) on official restructurings). Restructurings on domestic-currency sovereign debt are not included.

(iii) Restructurings of medium- and long-term debt. We thus exclude short-term rollovers or bridge financing deals, or other temporary arrangements between debtors and creditors (see Cruces and Trebesch [2013]).

(iv) Finalized deals. We disregard restructurings that were agreed on but were never de facto implemented, for example, when country parliaments reject an agreement.

We rely on a wide variety of sources to compile our restructuring and haircut archive. Importantly, we focus on the annual reports of bondholder organizations that negotiated with defaulting countries in the 19th and early 20th centuries, in particular the British Corporation of Foreign Bondholders (CFB), the US-based Foreign Bondholders Protective Council (FBPC), and the French Association Nationale des Porteurs Franҫais de Valeurs Mobiliéres. The reports provide rich details on past defaults and restructurings and are therefore our most important source. To cross-check the information by the creditor committees and to fill gaps in the data, additional sources were used, in particular annual investor reports such as Fenn’s Compendium of the English and Foreign Funds, Fortune’s Epitome of the Stock and Public Funds, Kimber's Records on Government Debts and other Foreign Securities, Moody's Manuals on Foreign and American Government Securities, and the London Stock Exchange Yearbooks. In addition, we incorporate in our comprehensive database case studies from the literature, communiques of the creditor organizations, official gazettes of the debtor country, and press articles. Our integrative approach compares each data point in the restructuring agreements and the debt instruments involved across available sources.

The final sample used in the analysis includes 313 external sovereign debt restructurings in 91 countries between 1815 and 2015.<sup>24</sup> This number represents a lower bound, since we summarize multiple restructurings into a single event if they resulted from the same default event (for example, when the negotiation process of a given default results in separate restructurings for different creditor groups or bond currencies, such as restructurings of USD vs. GBP bonds; see Meyer [2021]). More specifically, we combine a total of 358 individual restructurings into the final event sample of 313 cases, so that each default receives just one haircut estimate. We use restructuring amounts in USD as weights when combining cases. Appendix C provides more details and a breakdown by country. Figure 1 shows the yearly distribution over 200 years for the entire 358 case sample, while in the remainder of the analysis we use the final sample of 313 restructuring cases (with combined restructurings).

> 24 For 68 of the 91 defaulters, we could also construct monthly bond price series. For the remaining 23 countries, we estimated haircuts but have no price data. In addition, we collected price data for another 23 countries that never defaulted on their external debt obligations (see Section 4), bringing the total pricing sample to 91 countries.

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