Macroeconomics has a long tradition of inspecting and interpreting patterns in graphs of aggregate data. However, the move towards more precise quantification of macroeconomic phenomena has seen academics shift away from a study of turning points, which are a natural and obvious way of...

This paper develops concordance indices for studying the simultaneous occurrence of financial crises across markets and/or countries. The typically low incidence of financial crises necessitates a change in the definition of concordance from those recently developed for the business cycle...

The existing literature promotes a number of alternative methods to test for the presence of contagion during financial market crises. This paper reviews those methods, and shows how they are related in a unified framework. A number of extensions are also suggested which allow for multivarite...