We study the nature of sovereign credit risk using an extensive sample of CDS spreads for 26 developed and emerging-market countries. Sovereign credit spreads are surprisingly highly correlated, with just three principal components accounting for more than 50 percent of their variation....

We analyze portfolio credit risk in light of dynamic quot;frailty,quot; by which the credit qualities of different firms depend on common unobservable time-varying default covariates. Frailty is estimated to have a large impact on estimated conditional mean default rates, above and beyond those...