The Global Financial Crisis: World Market or Regional Contagion Effects?

In the last two decades, the world economy has been challenged by different economic and financial crisis. These events have captured researchers’ attention, and in particular the analysis of contagion effects derived from stock market shocks have been a focal point of interesting discussions. However, there is little consensus on how contagion should be defined and indentified. Consequently, this paper contributes to the already settled debate on the area proposing the analysis of contagion effects in a worldwide framework, where three different econometric models to test for contagion are being used. The main results are in line with most of the existing literature analysing this topic, and our results do not find strong evidence supporting contagion effects derived from the US stock markets, neither in a worldwide nor in a regional form. Hence, these findings bring evidence that there is still a lot of work to be done on how to define contagion, and even more so, on how to measure it.