Emerging market economies (EMEs) regularly tap domestic and international capital markets through scheduled sovereign bond auctions. In this paper, we leverage a novel dataset covering over 75,000 sovereign issuance events and 20,000 securities from 20 EMEs between the early 2000s and 2023 to analyze the determinants of bond issuance choices, focusing on volume, maturity, and currency denomination. We find that local currency debt issuance is largely associated with refinancing needs, while