The Asian Crisis Contagion: A Dynamic Correlation Approach Analysis

In this paper, we are interested in testing for contagion caused by the Thai bath collapse in July 1997. In line with earlier work, shift-contagion is defined as a structural change in the international propagation mechanisms of financial shocks. We adopt the Bai and Perron's (1998) structural break approach to detect the endogenous break points in the pair-wise time-varying correlations between Thailand and seven Asian stock market returns. Our approach allows solving the misspecification problem of crisis window. Our results indicate the existence of shift-contagion in the Asian crisis caused by the crisis in Thailand.