Empirical Modelling of Contagion: A Review of Methodologies

The existing literature promotes a number of alternative methods to test for the presence of contagion during financial market crises. This paper reviews those methods, and shows how they are related in a unified framework. A number of extensions are also suggested which allow for multivarite testing, endogeneity issues and structural breaks.Contagion, Financial Crises

The Term Premium and The UK Economy 1980-2007

The term premium is estimated from an empirically coherent open economy VAR model of the UK economy where the model specifically accounts for the mixed nature of the data and cointegration between some variables. Using this framework the estimated negative term premia for 1980-2007 is decomposed into its contributing shocks, where the role of inflation and monetary policy shocks are shown to be dominant in the evolution of the term premium. Projecting into the 2007-2008 crisis period reveals the extent of the shocks to the UK economy, and also shows the similarities in term premia behaviour with those experienced during the 1998 Russian crisis, likely reflecting the flight to cash experienced in both crises

A SVECM Model of the UK Economy and The Term Premium

The term premium is estimated from an empirically coherent open economy VAR model of the UK economy where the model speci?cally accounts for the mixed nature of the data and cointegration between some variables. Using this framework the estimated negative term premia for 1980-2007 is decomposed into its contributing shocks, where the role of in?ation and monetary policy shocks are shown to be dominant in the evolution of the term premium. Projecting into the 2008 crisis period reveals the extent of the shocks to the UK economy, and also shows the similarities in term premia behaviour with those experienced during the 1998 Russian crisis.Consumer Economics: Theory, Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis, Demographic Economics

Synchronisation of financial crises

This paper develops concordance indices for studying the simultaneous occurrence of financial crises. The indices are designed to cope with these typically low incidence events. This leads us to confine attention to non-tranquil periods to develop a bivariate index and its multivariate analog for potentially serially correlated categorical data. An application to the Bordo et al. (2001) data set reveals the extent of concordance in banking and currency crises across countries. The internationalisation of financial crises in the 20th century is shown to have increased for currency crises and decreased for banking crises