Was there a contagion between major European and Croatian stock markets? An analysis of co-exceedances

This article examines extreme returns co-movement and contagion between the Croatian and 10 European stock markets during major financial market distress periods in the period from end of 2003 until start of 2012. The extreme return co-movement analysis is based on analysis of coincidences of extreme return shocks (co-exceedances; extreme returns are defined as lower 5% daily returns in the empirical return distributions) across investigated countries. I found that the first instances of co-exceedances between the Croatian and the observed European stock markets occurred in the 2007, during the subprime mortgage crisis as the predecessor of the global financial crisis. With the start of the global financial crisis, the count of co-exceedances across all observed pairs of stock markets markedly increased. In order to separate contagion from interdependence, I further applied a multinomial logistic function, that enabled me to control for common world and regional factors that affected all investigated stock markets simultaneously. In controlling for these factors I found that the increase in the count of negative return co-exceedances between the Croatian and major European stock markets during the global financial crisis and the eurozone debt crisis cannot be attributed to contagion.