This book examines international bargaining over debt rescheduling among debtors, lenders, governments, and international organizations. It examines the cases of Mexico and Peru over the last 170 years, and focuses on Argentina and Brazil in the 1980s and 1990s. Although my primary objective has been to understand this important empirical problem, my research has also been driven by what I find to be several theoretical lacunae in the literature on international politics and economics.

Recent studies by political scientists and economists who emphasize single variable explanations of international political and economic phenomena provide a valuable corrective to the excessive eclecticism of historical studies. By focusing on the theoretical mileage that a particular factor gives us, these scholars have allowed us to move away from primarily descriptive studies to more analytical accounts of international political and economic events. But the pendulum now seems to have swung too far in the direction of unicausal explanations. As a result, we have seen fewer integrative approaches that carefully build on the fertile insights of these analysts. In my earlier work on international regimes, Liberal Protectionism, I made an effort to construct a synthetic account of the evolution of such arrangements. In this new book on debt rescheduling, although my focus is not on international regimes, I have pursued my earlier interest in integrated explanations by developing a more formal and rigorous explanation to explain international bargaining outcomes.