The financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 has been truly remarkable in its severity and global reach.
This paper seeks to understand the global transmission channels of the crisis in equity markets, studying
the cross-sectional heterogeneity of the crisis incidence across 55 equity markets and 10 sectors. A first
key result is that from the perspective of a factor model with global and domestic factors, we find
evidence of contagion. The comovements of our portfolios cannot be fully explained with the factor
model without allowing for shifts in factor exposures. Yet, the interdependence model explains 75% of
total predictable return variation. Second, despite its origination in the United States, we find weak
evidence of contagion from U.S. markets to equity markets globally during the crisis. Instead, there was
contagion from domestic equity markets to individual domestic equity portfolios. Third, the financial
crisis did not spread indiscriminately across countries and sectors. The exposure to external factors,
such as via banking, trade or financial linkages, played no meaningful role for the global equity market
transmission of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009. However, portfolios in countries with weak
economic fundamentals, poor sovereign ratings, and high fiscal and current account deficits
experienced more contagion, both from U.S. and domestic markets, and were overall more severely
affected by the global financial crisis. This provides strong support for the validity of the wake-up call
hypothesis as a transmission device of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009. Moreover, the presence of
policies to protect domestic banks during the crisis, in the form of debt and deposit guarantees, was
instrumental in shielding domestic equity portfolios to some extent from the financial crisis of 2007 to
2009.
The irony of this perhaps most global crisis ever is that a market’s external exposure played
such a small role in determining its equity market performance. Instead, investors focused primarily on
country-specific characteristics and punished markets with poor macroeconomic fundamentals, policies
and institutions. Our findings support the recent efforts by policymakers and international organizations
to better understand macro prudential risks and perhaps institute a closer surveillance of such risks both
at a country level and at a global leve