Sovereign Risk and Contagion Effects in the Eurozone: A Bayesian Stochastic Correlation Model

This research proposes a Bayesian multivariate stochastic volatility (MSV) model to analyze the dynamics of sovereign risk in eurozone CDS markets during the recent financial crisis. We follow an MCMC approach to parameters and latent variable estimation and provide evidence of significant volatility shifts in asset returns, strong simultaneous increases in cross-market correlations, as well as sharp declines in correlations patterns. Overall, these findings are highly consistent with various empirical characterizations of contagion put forward in the literature, allowing us to conclude that the recent financial crisis generated severe contagion effects in sovereign debt markets of eurozone countries.