We estimate the pricing of sovereign risk for a large number of countries within and outside of Europe, before and after the global financial crisis, based on fiscal space and other economic fundamentals. We measure how accurately the model predicts CDS spreads based on fundamentals, and...

We define the notion of 'de facto fiscal space' of a country as the inverse of the outstanding public debt relative to the de facto tax base, where the latter measures the realized tax collection, averaged across several years to smooth for business cycle fluctuations. We apply this concept to...