Over the past half dozen years, the three of us have written a number of papers on sovereign bond contracts.  In the first set of papers, we documented the stickiness phenomenon (the reluctance of lawyers to modify standard contract language even though obsolescence posed a significant risk of misinterpretation). In the second set of papers, we studied the phenomenon of random mutations to the standard form language that occurred without an apparent rational purpose (here, here, and here). Both findings seemed completely at odds with the standard account of how sophisticated lawyers drafted multi-billion dollar financial … Read more