Contagion and interdependence: measuring CEE banking sector co-movements

Making use of ten years of daily data, this paper examines whether banking sector co-movements be-tween the three largest Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) can be attributed to contagion or to interdependence. Our tests based on simple unadjusted correlation analysis uncover evidence of conta-gion between all pairs of countries. Adjusting for market volatility during turmoil, however, produces dif-ferent results. We then find contagion from the Czech Republic to Hungary during this time, but all other cross-market co-movements are rather attributable rather to strong cross-market linkages. In addition, we construct a set of dummy variables to try to capture the impact of macroeconomic news on these markets. Controlling for own-country fundamentals, we discover that the correlations diminish between the Czech Republic and Poland, but that coefficients for all pairs remain substantial and significant. Finally, we ad-dress the problem of simultaneous equations, omitted variables and heteroskedasticity, and adjust our data accordingly. We confirm our previous findings. Our tests provide evidence in favour of parameter insta-bility, again signifying the existence of contagion arising from problems in the Czech Republic affecting Hungary during much of 1996.