A growing literature debates the explanations for the cyclical properties of emerging markets based on the RBC small open economy model. Two leading explanations are considered: trend shocks (Aguiar and Gopinath 2007), and financial frictions (Neumeyer and Perri 2004; Garcia-Cicco, Pancrazi, and Uribe 2010). We provide analytical parameter restrictions that, within this class of models, favor the trend shocks explanation. This effort centers the debate on two issues. First, the trend shocks explanation crucially requires the interest rate to be very insensitive to changes in the stock of debt. This raises concerns about robustness, and quantitative results confirm that the trend shocks explanation is fragile even in the original model specification. Second, it is difficult to obtain a realistic and powerful propagation of trend shocks in the RBC framework: Using the parameter restrictions generates a fall of labor supply after a positive trend shock. Lastly, even when the analytical restirctions are satisfied, trend shocks are still not able to compete against other shocks introduced into the RBC framework in terms of variance decomposition.