Detecting contagion during financial crises requires the demarcation of crisis periods. We develop a method for endogenously dating both the start and finish of crises, along with measuring contagion effects. Identification is achieved by coupling smooth transition functions with structural...

In the framework of structural VAR models with ARCH effect, we show that a sufficient condition for the local identification of a structural model is that at most one structural shock is homoskedastic. Our approach is based on a result of Rothenberg (1971)