This paper models the causes of the 2008 financial crisis together with its manifestations, using a Multiple Indicator Multiple Cause (MIMIC) model. Our analysis is conducted on a cross‐section of 85 countries; we focus on international linkages that may have allowed the crisis to spread across countries. Our model of the cross‐country incidence of the crisis combines 2008 changes in real GDP, the stock market, country credit ratings, and the exchange rate. We explore the linkages between these manifestations of the crisis and a number of its possible causes from 2006 and earlier. The causes we consider are both national (such as equity market run‐ups that preceded the crisis) and, critically, international financial and real linkages between countries and the epicenter of the crisis. We consider the United States to be the most natural origin of the 2008 crisis, though we also consider six alternative sources of the crisis. A country holding American securities that deteriorate in value is exposed to an American crisis through a financial channel. Similarly, a country which exports to the United States is exposed to an American downturn through a real channel. Despite the fact that we use a wide number of possible causes in a flexible statistical framework, we are unable to find strong evidence that international linkages can be clearly associated with the incidence of the crisis. In particular, countries

In 2011 all ECB publications feature a motif taken from the €100 banknote. NOTE: This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the European Central Bank (ECB). The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the ECB. This paper can be downloaded without charge from

This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. This paper attempts to explain the recent rise and differentiation of sovereign spreads across the countries of the eurozone. Following the onset of the subprime crisis in July 2007, spreads rose but mainly on account of common global factors. The rescue of Bear Stearns in March 2008 marked a turning point. Countries thereafter were increasingly differentiated. Sovereign spreads of a eurozone country tended to rise when the prospects of its domestic financial sector worsened. It appears, therefore, that the rescue of Bear Stearns created a link between financial sector vulnerabilities and a larger contingent liability on public finances. Following the failure of Lehman Brothers, spreads also rose faster for countries with higher ratios of public debt-to-GDP. These transitional dynamics appear to have concluded with the nationalization of Anglo Irish: sovereign spreads throughout the eurozone jumped, with the

The recent crisis highlighted the importance of globally active banks in linking markets. One channel for this linkage is through how these banks manage liquidity across their entire banking organization. We document that funds regularly flow between parent banks and their affiliates in diverse foreign markets. We use the Great Recession as an opportunity to identify the balance sheet shocks to parent banks in the United States, and then explore which foreign affiliate features are associated with those businesses being protected, for example their status as important locations in sourcing funding or as destinations for foreign investment activity. We show that distance from the parent organization lays a significant role in this allocation, where distance is bank-affiliate specific and depends on the ex ante relative importance of such locations as local funding pools and in their overall foreign investment strategies. These flows are a form of global interdependence previously unexplored in the literature on international shock transmission.

The main contribution of this paper is to propose and theoretically justify bootstrap methods for regressions where some of the regressors are factors estimated from a large panel of data. We derive our results under the assumption that p T =N! c, where 0 c < 1 (N and T are the crosssectional and the time series dimensions, respectively), thus allowing for the possibility that factors estimation error enters the limiting distribution of the OLS estimator. We consider general residualbased bootstrap methods and provide a set of high level conditions on the bootstrap residuals and on the idiosyncratic errors such that the bootstrap distribution of the OLS estimator is consistent. We subsequently verify these conditions for a simple wild bootstrap residual-based procedure. Our main results can be summarized as follows. When c = 0, as in Bai and Ng (2006), the crucial condition for bootstrap validity is the ability of the bootstrap regression scores to mimic the serial dependence of the original regression scores. Mimicking the cross sectional and/or serial dependence of the idiosyncratic errors in the panel factor model is asymptotically irrelevant in this case since the limiting distribution of the original OLS estimator does not depend on these dependencies. Instead, when c> 0, a two-step residual-based bootstrap is required to capture the factors estimation uncertainty, which shows up as an asymptotic bias term (as we show here and as was recently discussed by Ludvigson and Ng (2009b)). Because the bias depends on the cross sectional dependence of the idiosyncratic error term, bootstrap validity depends crucially on the ability of the bootstrap panel factor model to capture this cross sectional dependence.

Fund The protracted decline in output volatility – the Great Moderation – began to reach its limits by the mid-1990s, and volatility even showed a mild rise in some countries. Domestic shocks did not typically rise but we find that they did spread more rapidly across borders. One reason for the faster transmission of domestic shocks was the increased fragmentation of production across multiple global locations that increasingly included the more volatileemergingmarkets.Althoughthisdevelopmentwasgenerallybenign, it had latent implications for triggering spikes in volatility since domestic stresses could rapidly spillover across borders. The cascading effects of such The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or its Executive Board. They are grateful to Mark Watson for sharing the estimation codes and his generous clarifications, James Stock for helpful discussions, and for guidance and feedback to two anonymous referees, the editor, Benn Steil, Klaus Adam, Olivier

Three assumptions helped to guide initial thinking about the impact of the US – now global – credit crisis. Each of those assumptions has had to be revised substantially. The first one was that the crisis could be contained at relatively low cost within the United States. Yet the July 2009 update to the IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report (IMF [2009b]) put global credit losses

The views in this paper are solely the responsibility of the authors and should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco or the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. This paper was produced under the auspices of the Center for Pacific Basin Studies within the Economic Research

This paper documents an increase in the correlations between credit default swap (CDS) spread changes during the credit crisis and investigates the source of that increase. One possible explanation is that correlations increased because fundamental values became more correlated during the crisis. Alternatively, correlations may have increased because of contagion, rather than because of an increase in the correlation between fundamental values. I find that changes in the fundamental determinants of credit risk account for only a small fraction of this increase in correlation. Further, I show that change in counterparty risk did not affect correlations during the turmoil. In contrast, I find that heightened liquidity risk contributed to the increase in correlations; however, changes in liquidity alone cannot explain the full increase. Finally, I show that a systematic re-pricing of credit risk, as evidenced by increased volatility in the default risk premium, was the main factor that amplified correlations.

In this paper we propose a fully nonparametric procedure to test for conditional quantile independence. Let Y, X, be random variables. The question we are interested in is whether a particular quantile of the conditional distribution F (Y jX) is independent of.