Fatal Attraction: using distance to measure contagion in good times as well as bad

This paper proposes a new measure of contagion that is good at anticipating future vulnerabilities. Building on previous work, it uses correlations of equity markets across countries to measure contagion, but in a departure from previous practice measures contagion using the relationship of these correlations with distance. Also in contrast to previous work, our test is good at identifying periods of “positive contagion,” in which capital flows to emerging markets in a herd-like manner largely unrelated to fundamentals. Identifying such periods of “fatal attraction” is important as they provide the essential ingredients for subsequent crises and rapid outflows of capital

Core and Periphery in the World Economy: An Empirical Assessment of the Integration of the Developing Countries Into the World Economy

In this paper a dynamic structural vector-autoregressive model is utilized to Analyze the impact of shocks from the developed center (G-7) on the less developed periphery. Three possibilities emerge with less developed nations being negatively dependent on the center, positively integrated with the center, or independent of the center. A less developed country is classified as negatively dependent when shocks from the center have a negative impact and are relatively important in explaining variations in the output of the developing country. A less developed country is positively integrated if the shocks from the center have positive effects and explain a large share of the variation in output in the developing country. The results indicate that from the sample of eighty-six developed countries only five could be considered dependent, while the others are roughly equally divided into those positively integrated and those that are independent. [F02, F43, 050]