On Synchronisation of Financial Crises

This paper develops concordance indices for studying the simultaneous occurrence of financial crises across markets and/or countries. The typically low incidence of financial crises necessitates a change in the definition of concordance from those recently developed for the business cycle literature (Harding and Pagan (2002,2003)). We propose to confine attention to non-tranquil periods and study the properties of the revised index. An application to East Asian countries reveals the extent of concordance in crises by both asset market and cou