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...

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...