We analyze the cross-border propagation of systemic risk in the international sovereign debt market. Using daily data on CDS spreads for 67 sovereign borrowers from 2002 to 2013 we define sovereign credit events as those in which the spread widens by more than 99.9% of all spread changes within...

Sovereign spreads can be broken up into two components: the expected loss from default and the risk premium, with the latter reflecting how investors price the risk of unexpected losses. We show that the risk premium is often the larger part of the spread