Markets contagion during financial crisis: A regime-switching approach

Within a Markov regime-switching VAR framework, we investigate the contagion effects among the stock market, real estate market, credit default market, and energy market covering the most recent financial crisis period when markets experience regime shifts. The results demonstrate that the watershed of regimes occurs around the start of the subprime crisis in 2007, after which the "risky" regime dominates the evolution of market chaos. During the financial crisis, excluding their own shocks, stock market shock and oil price shock are the main driving forces behind the credit default market and stock market variations. respectively. The energy market also appears to be more responsive to the stock market movements than the shocks originating from housing and credit markets. However, the impacts from the credit default market on the real estate market are not significant as expected. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.