This paper investigates banking and sovereign distress in the Eurozone and the importance of direct and indirect financial exposures. We use BIS cross-border banking claims to link member states in a GVAR framework and jointly model sectoral CDS premia. Based on balance sheet positions of an intermediate debtor country, we calculate indirect exposures and asses how the level of interconnectedness is impacted when indirect links are accounted for. We notice a general slowdown in financial integration and a reduction in cross-border assets in the hope of limiting international contagion. By differentiating between direct and indirect links, we show that the impact of reduced weights on core member states is mostly insignificant and that deleveraging strategies are not generally able to successfully reduce risk.

A power law typically governs the tail decay of financial returns but the constancy of the so-called tail index which dictates the tail decay remains relatively unexplored. We study the finite sample properties of some recently proposed endogenous tests for structural change in the tail index. Given that the finite sample critical values strongly depend on the tail parameters of the return distribution we propose a bootstrap-based version of the structural change test. Our empirical application spans developed and emerging financial asset returns. Somewhat surprisingly, emerging stock market tails are not more inclined to structural change than their developed counterparts. Emerging currency tails, on the contrary, do exhibit structural shifts in contrast to developed currencies. Our results suggest that extreme value theory (EVT) applications in hedging tail risks can assume stationary tail behavior over long time spans provided one considers portfolios that solely consist of stocks or bonds.

This paper implements estimation and testing procedures for comovements of stock market “cycles” or “phases” in Asia. We extend the Harding and Pagan [Harding, D., Pagan, A.P., 2006. Synchronization of cycles. Journal of Econometrics 132 (1), 59–79] test for strong multivariate nonsynchronization (SMNS) between business cycles to a test that allows for an imperfect degree of multivariate synchronization between stock market cycles. Moreover, we propose a test for endogenously determining structural change in the bivariate and multivariate synchronization indices. Upon applying the technique to five Asian stock markets we find a significant increase in the cross country comovements of Asian bullish and bearish periods in 1997. A power study of the stability test suggests that the detected increase in comovement is more of a sudden nature (i.e. contagion or “Asian Flu”) instead of gradual (i.e. financial integration). It is furthermore argued that stock market cycles and their propensity toward (increased) synchronization contain useful information for both investors, policy makers and financial regulators.

This paper proposes an original three-part sequential testing procedure (STP) with which to test for contagion using a multivariate model. First, conditional on breaks in the conditional mean, the procedure identifies distinct structural breaks in the volatility of a given set of countries. A further structural break test applied to the correlation matrix identifies and then dates the potential contagion mechanisms. As a third element, the STP tests for the distinctiveness of the break dates previously found. As a result of using multi-dimensional data, the STP has high testing power and is able to locate the dates of contagion more precisely. The application to European long-term interest rates shows that immediate contagion from Greece does not take place, but the dynamic spillovers are shown to increase after controlling for breaks in the different model parameters. For other countries we find evidence of both contagion and flight-to-quality mechanisms.