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This paper examines whether the level of anticorruption efforts in a country affects the stability of its banking system. After analyzing banking system stability in a large international sample of 26,865 of bank-year observations across 40 countries during 1987-2013, we argue that the following factors are involved: (1) anticorruption efforts, (2) inflation rate, (3) transparency, and (4) adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards. Our results support the idea that having a high anticorruption rating is related to high banking system stability. We also find that this relationship depends on a country's inflation rate and level of country-level investor protection, supporting the notion that anticorruption is relatively more important in poorer information environments. In addition, given that anticorruption has a stronger effect on financial stability when banks are within a corrupt environment, we posit that corruption may have insider marginal effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we proposed a new empirical method by combining generalized autoregressive score functions and a copula model with high-frequency data to model the conditional time-varying joint distribution of the government bond yields between Poland/Czech Republic/Hungary, and Germany. Capturing the conditional time-varying joint distribution of these bond yields allowed us to precisely measure the dependence of the government securities markets. In particular, we found a high dependence of these government securities markets in the long term, but a low dependence in the short term. In addition, we report that the Czech Republic showed the highest dependence with Germany, while Hungary showed the lowest. Moreover, we found that the systemic risk dynamics were consistent with the idea that the global financial crisis not only had spillover effects on countries with weak economic fundamentals (e.g., Hungary, which had the highest systemic risk), but also had contagion effects for both CEEC-3 countries and Germany. Finally, we confirm that three major market events, namely the EU accession, the global financial crisis, and the European debt crisis, caused structural changes to the dynamic correlation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the Markov regime switching approach, we investigate the dependency of short term sovereign credit default swap (SCDS) spread changes on a nation’s country-specific fundamental factors, local, regional and macroeconomic global factors. We find that the significance of the determinants of SCDS spread changes differ across the two states of our regime-switching model. Specifically, in the good state, the weekly SCDS spread changes are mainly determined by local, regional and fundamental factors; whereas global variables have a stronger influence in the bad regime. In particular, US market returns play a dominant role in influencing the SCDS spread change in the bad state suggesting loss aversion and flight–to–quality behavior of investors. We then examine the cross-sectional differences of the above regime switching effect based on country-specific characters and find that the regime switching effect is associated with a nation’s country-specific characters such as openness, economic size and so forth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]