Policy makers aim to avoid banking crises, and although they can to some extent control domestic conditions, internationally transmitted crises are difficult to tackle. This paper identifies international contagion in banking during the 2007–2009 crisis for 54 economies. We identify three channels of contagion – systematic, idiosyncratic and volatility – and find evidence for these in 45 countries. Banking crises are overwhelmingly associated with the presence of both systematic and idiosyncratic contagion. The results reveal that crisis shocks transmitted from a foreign jurisdiction via idiosyncratic contagion increase the likelihood of a systemic crisis in the domestic banking system by almost 37 percent, whereas increased exposure via systematic contagion does not necessarily destabilize the domestic banking system. Thus while policy makers and regulatory authorities are rightly concerned with the systematic transmission of banking crises, reducing the potential for idiosyncratic contagion can importantly reduce the consequences for the domestic economy.

The Russian bond default in August 1998 and the long-term capital management (LTCM) recapitalization announcement in the following month represent an unusual period of volatility in international bond markets with bond spreads increasing dramatically across the globe. Using a latent factor model and a new data set spanning bond markets across Asia, Europe and the Americas, we quantify the contribution of contagion to the spread of these two crises. The maximum amount of contagion experienced by any of the countries investigated is about 17% of total volatility in bond spreads, with the main effects due to the Russian crisis. The results also show that both emerging and developed markets experienced contagion during the period.

We analyze the transmission of shocks between global banking, domestic banking and the non-financial sector for eleven Eurozone countries. Using a Markov-switching Factor augmented VAR model, we distinguish between contagion, interdependence and decoupling as shock transmission mechanisms during the ‘crisis’ regime. Contagion played a role in propagating global banking shocks to the banking sectors of smaller states, exacerbating the crisis in these countries. In contrast, the non-financial sectors suffered little contagion from either external or domestic banking shocks, and generally managed to decouple from the banking industry – indicative of being able to source alternative financing and shield themselves from the crisis. However, shocks originating in the non-financial sector trigger contagious effects for both the domestic banking sector and, to a lesser extent global banking, thereby acting as a source of fragility for the financial sector during crisis periods.

We propose an identified structural GARCH model to disentangle the dynamics of financial market crises. We distinguish between the hypersensitivity of a domestic market in crisis to news from foreign non-crisis markets, and the contagion imported to a tranquil domestic market from foreign crises. The model also enables us to connect unobserved structural shocks with their source markets using variance decompositions and to compare the size and dynamics of impulses during crises periods with tranquil period impulses. To illustrate, we apply the method to data from the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis which consists of a complicated set of interacting crises. We find significant hypersensitivity and contagion between these markets but also show that links may strengthen or weaken. Impulse response functions for an equally-weighted equity portfolio show the increasing dominance of Korean and Hong Kong shocks during the crises and covariance responses demonstrate multiple layers of contagion effects.

Detecting contagion during financial crises requires the demarcation of crisis periods. We develop a method for endogenously dating both the start and finish of crises, along with measuring contagion effects. Identification is achieved by coupling smooth transition functions with structural GARCH. In an application to US equity, bond and REIT returns for 2001–2010, we identify four phases; a pre-crisis period to July 2007, two phases of crisis up to and following October 2008, and a post-crisis phase from mid-May 2009. We detect significant contagion during the crisis and find evidence that the post-crisis period has not returned to pre-crisis relations.