The recent Euro area crisis, which has originally been driven mainly by macroeconomic factors, has had a strong impact also on financial markets leading internationally to what is referred as contagion, that is co-movements among asset prices which have been excessive respect to fundamentals....

This paper proposes a new mutual exciting regime-switching model where crises can spread contagiously across countries. Each country has its own hidden stochastic process that determines whether it is in a normal or crisis regime. The mutual-excitation component allows interactions in the Markov...

Over the past year, euro area sovereign spreads have exhibited an unprecedented degree of volatility. This paper explores how much of these large movements reflected shifts in (i) global risk aversion (ii) country-specific risks, directly from worsening fundamentals, or indirectly from...