Tree Networks to assess Financial Contagion

We propose a two-layered tree network model that decomposes financial contagion into a global component, composed of inter-country contagion effects, and a local component, made up of inter-institutional contagion channels. The model is effectively applied to a database containing time series of daily CDS spreads of major European financial institutions (banks and insurance companies), and reveals the importance of monitoring both channels to assess financial contagion. Our empirical application reveals evidence of a high inter-country and inter-institutional vulnerability at the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008 and during the sovereign crisis in 2011. The results identify France as central to the inter-country contagion in the Euro area during the financial crisis, while Italy dominates during the sovereign crisis. The application of the model to detect contagion between sectors of the European economy reveals similar findings, and identifies the manufacturing sector as the most central, while, at the company level, financial institutions dominate during the 2008 crisis.