This paper analyzes alternative models for emerging sovereign ratings. Although a small number of economic fundamentals explain ratings reasonably well, variations in those economic fundamentals are themselves explained by a small number of world factors. On the other hand, global financial variables associated with risk aversion are additionally required in order to explain the significant spread compression at the end of 2006. To determine whether ratings matter for spreads, the paper compares results across different methodologies, in particular exploiting differences in opinion between rating agencies. The evidence from this and previous methodologies is that ratings do matter. Finally, the paper finds that global indicators of risk aversion have become less important for emerging market spreads and that the effect of sub-prime news is less than the effect of “average news” on emerging economy credit default swap (CDS) spreads.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department in its series RES Working Papers with number
4565.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
António Afonso & Pedro Gomes & Philipp Rother, 2006.
"What “Hides” Behind Sovereign Debt Ratings?,"
Working Papers
2006/35, Department of Economics at the School of Economics and Management (ISEG), Technical University of Lisbon..
[Downloadable!]