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Australia notably was one of the few developed nations to avoid a technical recession subsequent to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). However, the fact that the nation escaped a technical recession doesn’t mean that citizens and local governments were not subject to some of the measures associated with post-GFC austerity. In particular, intergovernmental grants – an important source of revenue for Australian local governments – were frozen by the federal government seeking to mitigate large deficits over the forward estimates. This chapter compares and contrasts the budgetary outcomes for the local governments of Australia’s two most populous states – New South Wales and Victoria. We find that the disparate regulatory controls in the two municipal jurisdictions were strongly associated with the budgetary outcomes of the individual municipalities: In particular, we present evidence which suggests that taxation limitations and lax investment guidelines in New South Wales can be associated with relatively inferior budgetary positions and higher budgetary volatility. By way of contrast, Victorian councils had the flexibility to vary rates of taxation to the changing conditions and largely avoided investment losses associated with the financial failure of Lehman Brothers. In New South Wales the regulatory response to deteriorating municipal budgets (subsequent to the GFC) has been to execute a radical programme of forced amalgamations. Somewhat ironically, the Victorian state government has recently imposed taxation limitations on its municipalities. In summary, this chapter demonstrates the saliency of regulatory constraints on municipal resilience, in the context of post-GFC economic challenges.

The systematic risks related to credit financing has received significant attention in the academic domain during and after any financial crisis. However, the role of insurance has not been adequately studied in the context of crises. The extant literature also shows that the scale of credit financing depends upon the availability of credit insurance and on the policy orientation. Past evidence shows that demand for credit insurance was significantly high during the crisis period. Therefore, this chapter proposes to study the role of various combinations of these two aspects near the period of crisis. The findings of this chapter are based on the outcomesof previous research articles on these topics. The research articles are gathered from various online databases for the years 2000–2014 for the G7 economies. This chapter has alsoincluded facts from contextual policy documents on monetary and fiscal policies where it finds them necessary. Broadly, this chapter describes the role of policies when two mutually dependent industries interact and adversely impact market equilibrium.

This chapter examines the impact of banking competition, bank regulation, and the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008–2009 on banks’ productivity changes. For the empirical analysis, I apply a semi-parametric two-step approach of Malmquist index estimates and bootstrap regression to a cross-country panel data of 8,451 commercial banks from 82 countries over the period 2004–2012. Empirical results show that (1) banking competition and capital regulation significantly enhance bank productivity, (2) a tighter bank supervision have a positive impact on bank productivity, and (3) bank productivity decreases during the GFC, but starts to increase as the GFC recovers. I also present consistent evidence that commercial banks in countries with better national governance have higher productivity growth before, during and after the GFC.

This chapter investigates the impact of policy interest rate news from the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) and the European Central Bank (ECB) on stock returns and volatilities of U.S. NYSE and German DAX listed commercial banks. We find that Fed news has the most influence on both U.S. and German listed bank stocks and an unexpected policy rate increase (decrease) lowers (raises) returns and raises volatility in the majority of cases. On the other hand, ECB news generally increases bank stock volatility in the United States but has little impact within its own domestic banking industry. While our results for the U.S. listed banks confirm that their stock prices are more responsive in bad economic times and also during periods of monetary tightening, we find disparities for German banks suggesting that U.S. and European banking industries respond heterogeneously to monetary policy news but the Global Financial Crisis increased the sensitivity of all banks to monetary policy news.

This chapter assesses the volatility spillover from US monetary policy consequent upon the onset of three episodes primarily engineered by the US Fed, namely quantitative easing 1, taper tantrum and balance sheet normalization (BSN) to select emerging market economies (Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa and Turkey) considering around six months pre- and post-occurrence of these events. AR(k)-GARCH (p,q) framework has been used to assess the spillover effect influencing the return of the financial assets and trekking to their volatility segregated as news and persistence effect across markets and economies under study. The authors find that at the overall level, news impact significantly enhanced volatility of bond and currency markets, however, less impact was observed owing to the onset of BSN announcement as markets had factored the news through the well-articulated forward guidance of the Fed.

At the onset of the Global Financial Crisis in 2007–2008, majority of the analysts and policymakers have anticipated contagion from the markets volatility in the advanced economies (AEs) to the emerging markets (EMs). This chapter examines the volatility spillovers from the AEs’ equity markets (Japan, the United States and Europe) to the four key EMs, the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China).

The period under study, from 2000 through mid-2014, reflects a time of varying regimes in markets volatility, including the periods of dot.com bubble, the Global Financial Crisis and the European Sovereign Debt Crisis, the Great Recession and the start of the Russian-Ukrainian geopolitical crisis. To estimate volatility cross-linkages between the AEs and BRIC markets, we use multivariate GARCH-BEKK model across a number of specifications.

We find that, the developed economies weighted return volatility did have a significant impact on volatility across all four of the BRIC economies returns. However, contrary to the consensus view, there was no evidence of volatility spillover from the individual AEs onto BRIC economies with the exception of a spillover from Europe to Brazil. The implied forward-looking expectations for markets volatility had a strong and significant spillover effect onto Brazil, Russia and China, and a weaker effect on India.

The evidence on volatility spillovers from the AEs markets to EMs puts into question the traditional view of financial and economic systems sustainability in the presence of higher orders of integration of the global monetary and financial systems. Overall, data suggest that we are witnessing less than perfect integration between BRIC economies and AEs markets to-date can offer some volatility hedging opportunities for investors.

Our chapter contributes to the growing literature on volatility spillovers from the AEs to the EMs in a number of ways. Firstly, we provide a formal analysis of the spillovers to the BRIC economies over the periods of recent crises. Secondly, we make new conclusions concerning longer-term spillovers as opposed to higher frequency volatility contagion covered by the previous literature. Thirdly, we consider a new channel for volatility contagion – the trade-weighted AEs volatility measure.