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We assess how investors evaluate sovereign borrowers, arguing that sovereign risk is less 'sovereign' than previous research assumes. Investors evaluate governments based not only on what they do, but also on investors' views of similar, 'peer' countries. Professional investors use investment categorizations (geography, sovereign credit rating, or level of market development) as a heuristic device. As a result, peer country effects, as well as country-specific and global factors (booms, crises, or shocks), should explain sovereign interest rates. The peer effects we expect are regular features of international capital markets, rather than phenomena that occur in periods of market turmoil. We assess our expectations using error correction models of monthly sovereign risk premiums, which reveal significant interdependencies in sovereign risk assessments among countries, net of global and domestic predictors. Such contagion emerges principally in the short term, although we also find robust, long-term ties in sovereign risk assessments among countries sharing common regional classifications. Hence, our evidence suggests that professional investors' reliance on country categorizations facilitates the transmission of market sentiments-which include lower as well as higher risk premiums charged-across groups of countries, even when countries differ in key measures of creditworthiness. Our analyses highlight the importance of investors' ideas regarding country categorizations; they call into question the efficiency of sovereign debt markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are equity markets just another facet of global finance, or are they unique in their responses to—and influences on—government policies and institutions? Recent work has explored the impact of political factors on bond market behavior and foreign direct investment, but little attention has been paid to stock markets. On the basis of the particular concerns of equity investors, we hypothesize a positive association between stock-market valuations and levels of democracy, shareholder rights, legal traditions, and capital-account liberalization, a negative association with real interest rates, and no association with fiscal deficits or surpluses. We assess our expectations by analyzing the political and institutional determinants of aggregate price-to-earnings ratios for a sample of up to 37 countries from 1985 to 2004, using both cross-sectional and time-series cross-sectional analyses. We find support for most, but not all, of our hypotheses. Our findings suggest that we must disaggregate the effects of different asset markets to understand the impact of economic globalization on government policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]