International Financial Contagion: Evidence from the Argentine Crisis of 2001-2002

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to look for evidence of financial contagion suffered by several countries as a result of the latest Argentine crisis. I focus my attention on a set of countries: Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Turkey, Uruguay, and Venezuela. I also focus exclusively on three financial markets: foreign exchange, stock exchange, and sovereign debt. In order to test the hypothesis of contagion, Vector Autoregression (VAR) models and instantaneous correlation coefficients corrected for heteroscedasticity are estimated. The analysis shows that there is no evidence of contagion. This result provides empirical support for the non-crisis-contingent theories of international financial contagion