This paper aims to contribute to the ESM's capacity to monitor sovereign vulnerabilities in the EFSF/ESM programme countries. The purpose is to early identify a build-up of sovereign vulnerabilities, which may threaten countries' repayment capacity. The assessment is based on a wide set of...

This paper studies the sovereign ratings of 74 countries from 2003 to 2016, disentangling rating drivers into a ‘fundamental' and ‘judgement' component based on Moody's methodology. We show that the agency applies judgement inconsistently across regions, income, rating levels and factors,...

We assess Japan’s sovereign credit rating dynamics and its long-term outlook using market implied and fundamental rating models. Japan’s recent market-implied ratings, which are based on government bond prices and Credit Default Swap (CDS) spreads, have outperformed actual ratings and this...