Forecasting Local Currency Bond Risk Premia of Emerging Markets: The Role of Cross-Country Macro-Financial Linkages

In this paper, we forecast local currency debt of five major emerging market countries (Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, and Turkey) over the period of January 2010 to January 2019 (with an in-sample: March 2005 to December 2018). We exploit information from a large set of economic and financial time series to assess the importance of not only “own-country” factors (derived from principal component and partial least squares approach), but also create “global” predictors by combining the country-specific variables across the five emerging economies. We find that while information on own-country factors can outperform the historical average model, global factors tend to produce not only greater statistical and economic gains, but also enhances market timing ability of investors, especially when we use the target-variable (bond premium) approach under the partial least squares method to extract our factors. Our results have important implications for not only fund managers, but also policymakers.