Sovereign debt in emerging market countries: not all of them are serial defaulters

Abstract

Avoiding to assign emerging market countries a ‘typical’ behaviour, this article considers the heterogeneity across them and through time to predict their sovereign default episodes. Moreover, it focuses on the imbalance between defaulted debt and GDP. For the first time, we use a panel nonlinear regime-switching model whose explanatory factors have a different impact on sovereign default, depending on the regime the country belongs to. We mitigate some common views of the literature (in particular the ‘serial default’ theory) and identify countries deserving to be monitored carefully, because of a higher exposure to sovereign default risk.Abbreviation: CRAG : Credit Rating Assessment Group; EMBI: Emerging Market Bond Index; FSI: Financial Stress Index; GDP: Gross Domestic Product; GFC: Global Financial Cycle; GTD: Gonzalez, Teräsvirta, and V. Dijk; IMF: International Monetary Fund; LM: Lagrange Multiplier; PSTR: Panel Smooth Transition Regression; PTR: Panel Threshold Regression; STAR: Smooth Transition Auto Regressive model; US: United States; VIX: Volatility Index