The paper analyses the drivers of sovereign risk for 31 advanced and emerging economies during the European sovereign debt crisis. It shows that a deterioration in countries' fundamentals and fundamentals contagion – a sharp rise in the sensitivity of financial markets to fundamentals – are...

We introduce a new measure of systemic risk, the change in the conditional joint probability of default, which assesses the effects of the interdependence in the financial system on the general default risk of sovereign debtors. We apply our measure to examine the fragility of the European...

We assess the role of financial linkages in the transmission of sovereign risk in the Euro Crisis. Building on the narrative approach by Romer and Romer (1989), we use financial news to identify structural shocks in a vector autoregressive model of daily sovereign CDS premia for eleven European...

Since the beginning of 2010, the Euro Area faces a severe sovereign debt crisis, now generally known as the Euro Crisis. While the Euro Crisis has its origin in Greece, problems have now spread to several other European countries as well. Dynamic conditional correlation models (DCC) are...

We assess the role of financial linkages for the transmission of sovereign risk in the Euro Crisis. Building on the narrative approach by Romer and Romer (1989), we use financial news to identify structural shocks in a VAR model of daily sovereign CDS for eleven European countries. To estimate...

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 paper investigates the determinants of the sovereign risk premium in African countries. We employ the dynamic fixed effects model to determine the key drivers of sovereign bond spreads. Country-specific effects are fixed and the inclusion of dummy variables using the Bai-Perron multiple...

The world economy is engulfed in an economic crisis. In an attempt to avert a repetition of the Great Depression, governments across the globe have borrowed heavily to finance fiscal stimulus packages. Rising debt levels have put the credit ratings of many countries, including those in the...

This paper proposes a quantitative theory of the interaction between private and public debt in an open economy. Excessive private debt increases the frequency of financial crises. During such crises the government provides fiscal bailouts financed with risky public debt. This response may cause...