We contribute to the literature on international risk spillovers by developing a unified framework based on spatial econometrics that enables us to address the following questions: (i) what are the effective transmission channels-real linkages and informational channels-of international risk spillovers across countries and/or regions, (ii) what are the most dominant ones, and (iii) which countries are most at risk for their environment and which are suffering the most from international exposure. Our analysis, based on 41 advanced and emerging economies from 2008Q1 to 2012Q4, shows that among the considered channels for explaining international spillovers of sovereign bond spreads, the informational channel is of utmost importance. Our results challenge previous findings from the literature in which the empirical strategy did not accommodate altogether important features of country spillovers, such as the coexistence of multiple transmission channels in the presence of contemporaneous and time-lagged interactions. Ultimately, our stress-testing analysis reveals important insights on countries prone either to international spillovers, international exposure or both at the regional and the worldwide level.

Beyond the general issue of institutional change at the aggregate level, some studies have shown that the diversity of Japanese firms has increased since the late 1990s, both in terms of performance and organization. This paper contributes to this literature by investigating the evolving employment practices at the firm level. In mobilizing a database of listed manufacturing firms, we focus on the evolution of the speed of downsizing between the 1990s and the 2000s. A specificity of our paper is that we do not limit our analysis to the introduction of individual effects but we rather resort to a Bayesian estimation procedure, which yields to (firm-specific) individual forecasts of the parameters of the adjustment process modelled with random coefficients. The first major result we get is a decreasing average speed of downsizing, contrary to what is found in a simple estimation with individual effects. Second, we confirm the increasing heterogeneity of Japanese firms between the 1990s and the 2000s, through a rising dispersion of the speed of downsizing. Third, we are able, from a descriptive viewpoint to identify some characteristics of firms with different speed of downsizing.