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...

How do financial markets respond to concerns over debt sustainability and the level of public debt in emerging markets? We introduce a measure of debt sustainability – the difference between the debt stabilizing primary balance and the primary balance – in an otherwise standard spread...

We re-assess the view that sovereigns with a history of default are charged only a small and/or short-lived premium on the interest rate warranted by observed fundamentals. Our reassessment uses a metric of such a “default premium” (DP) that is consistent with asymmetric information models...

We examine the welfare effects of bailouts in economies exposed to sovereign default risk. When a government of a small open economy requests a bailout from an international financial institution, it receives a non-defaultable loan of size G that comes with imposed debt limits. The government...

We propose a coherent framework using support vector regression (SRV) for generating and ranking a set of high quality models for predicting emerging market sovereign credit spreads. Our framework adapts a global optimization algorithm employing an hv-block cross-validation metric, pertinent for...

This paper examines the quarter-ahead out-of-sample predictability of Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines and Turkey credit spreads before and after the Lehman Brothers' default. A model based on the country-specific credit spread curve factors predicts no better than the random walk and slope...

We address credit cycle dependent sovereign credit risk determinants. In our model, the spread determinants' magnitude is conditional on an unobservable endogenous sovereign credit cycle as represented by the underlying state of a Markov regime switching process. Our explanatory variables are...

This study provides a dynamic analysis of the lead-lag relationship between sovereign Credit Default Swap (CDS) and bond spreads of the highly indebted southern European countries, considering an extensive time sample from the period before the global financial crisis to the latest developments...

This study investigates the term-structure of sovereign emerging market yield spreads by decomposing it into the default risk component and the residual risk premium for Eurobonds of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil. We find that the risk premium tends to increase with maturity and account for the...

We examine the determinants of spreads based on views regarding sovereign riskiness. The empirical analysis relies on panel data estimation techniques for 30 sovereign bonds for the period of 2009Q1 to 2017Q1, with data in quarterly frequency. We find that indeed there is a wide asymmetry in the...