Leading into a debt crisis, interest rate spreads on sovereign debt rise before the economy experiences a decline in productivity, suggesting that news about future economic developments may play an important role in these episodes. In a VAR estimation, a news shock has a larger contemporaneous...

"We show that computing business cycles in emerging economy models using the discrete state space technique may be misleading. We solve the models of sovereign default presented by Aguiar and Gopinath (2006) using interpolation. We find that the simulated behavior of the spread is quite...