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...