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Financial market spillovers around the globeThis paper investigates the transmission of return and volatility spillovers around the globe. It draws on index futures of three representative indices, namely the Dow Jones Euro Stoxx 50, the S&P 500 and the Nikkei 225. Devolatised returns and realised volatilities are modeled separately using a structural vector autoregressive model, thereby accounting for the particular sequential time structure of the trading venues. Within this framework, we test hypotheses in the spirit of Granger causality tests, investigate the short-run dynamics in the three markets using impulse response functions, and identify leadership effects through variance decomposition. Our key results are as follows. We find weak and shortlived return spillovers, in particular from the USA to Japan. Volatility spillovers are more pronounced and persistent. The information from the home market is most important for both returns and volatilities; the contribution from foreign markets is less pronounced in the case of returns than in the case of volatility. Possible gains in terms of forecasting precision when applying our modelling strategy are illustrated by a forecast evaluation.

We analyze the relationship between unemployment rate changes and government bond yields during and after the most recent financial crisis across nine industrialized countries. The study is conducted on a weekly basis and we therefore nowcast unemployment data, which are only available once a month, on a weekly frequency using Google search query data. In order to account for the time series' long-memory components during the first-stage nowcasting and the second-stage modeling, we draw on Corsi's (2009, JEF) heterogeneous autoregressive time series model. In particular, we adapt this idea to a setting of mixed-frequency nowcasting. Our results indicate that Google searches greatly increase the nowcasting accuracy of unemployment rate changes. The impact of an idiosyncratic rise in unemployment on bond yields turns out to be positive for European countries while it is negative for the United States and Australia. The speed of the response also varies. Not unexpectedly, bond yields do not have an impact on unemployment. Our findings have interesting implications for the way shocks are absorbed in economic systems that differ, in particular, with respect to the central bank's core tasks.