Trends of the Contagion Risk in Sovereign Spreads for Emerging European Countries

We investigate the sovereign spreads behavior of the European emerging countries using the clustering technique. Our main finding is that the distances between spreads during high volatile times is significantly lower than in normal periods, that is, the correlation is much higher. Secondly, the market sentiment explains a much higher percentage of the spreads movements during turbulent times. Thirdly, the link between spreads and macroeconomic fundamentals seems to be blurred compared with the expectations from the economic theory.