Stock market recovery from the 2008 financial crisis: The differences across Europe

• We find robust evidence on unexpected spillover effects during the recent crisis.
• Discrepancies between actual and expected speed of recovery are identified.
• Asymmetric absorption of negative and positive shocks is documented.
• The combination of stochastic and wavelet modeling reveals new insights.

This study investigates the influence of the 2008 financial crisis on a number of European stock markets. The sample includes EU benchmark indices as well as European markets with slowed or hampered recovery over a period of ten years (2004–2014) thus allowing a comparison on their development before, during and after the crisis. We utilize a novel approach based on a combination of stochastic modeling and continuous wavelet transform. It enables a robust distinction between expected and unexpected spillover effects as well as assessment of the expected speed of European stock markets recovery. It further quantifies the temporal boundaries of absorption of negative and positive shocks coming from the US stock market and explains the observed asymmetry. The studied European markets are divided into several groups and expectations are built on the speed of their recovery. We find that the major reasons for the discrepancies observed between actual and expected recovery for some of the markets are due to structural breaks in the co-movement with US market as well as to weak domestic fundamentals.