Our analysis takes the perspective of an equity fund manager who seeks a potential safe haven asset to protect her portfolio during market downturns. We employ a regime-switching framework, within which we separate common and idiosyncratic shocks, to assess the suitability of gold, 10-year and...

We test for contagion between pairs of East Asian equity markets over the period 1990-2007.We develop an econometric methodology that allows us to test for both 'shift'and 'pure' contagion within a unified framework. Using both Hong Kong and Thailand as potential shock sources, we find strong...

We examine if the benefits of international portfolio diversification are robust to time-varying asset return volatility. Since diversified portfolios are subject to common cross-country shocks, we focus on the transmission mechanism of such shocks in the presence of regime-switching volatility....

We analyze the stability of domestic financial linkages between periods of calm and turbulent market conditions. Our model develops a simultaneous test of shift contagion and bi-directional pure contagion, which is applied to the equity and currency markets of a group of East Asian emerging...