PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Eli M Remolona AU - Michela Scatigna AU - Eliza Wu TI - The Dynamic Pricing of Sovereign Risk in Emerging Markets AID - 10.3905/jfi.2008.705542 DP - 2008 Mar 31 TA - The Journal of Fixed Income PG - 57--71 VI - 17 IP - 4 4099 - https://pm-research.com/content/17/4/57.short 4100 - https://pm-research.com/content/17/4/57.full AB - This article introduces a new approach to pricing sovereign risk based on sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads. We estimate a dynamic market-based measure of sovereign risk and use it to decompose sovereign CDS spreads into expected losses from default and the market risk premia required by investors as compensation for default risk. Using a dynamic panel data model, we find that country-specific fundamentals primarily drive sovereign risk while global investors' risk aversion drives time variation in the risk premia. Consistent with this, we also find that the sovereign risk premia is more highly correlated than sovereign risk itself within emerging market regions. These results help us to explain the remarkable narrowing of emerging market spreads between 2002 and 2006 and to understand the pricing mechanism and channel of contagion for emerging debt markets.TOPICS: Emerging markets, credit default swaps, credit risk management, statistical methods