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Dependence between Stock Returns of Italian Banks and the Sovereign Risk

We analyze the interdependence between the government yield spread and stock returns of the banking sector in Italy during the years 2003–2015. In a first step, we find that the Spearman’s rank correlation between the yield spread and the Italian banking system changed significantly after September 2008. According to this finding, we split the time window in two sub-periods. While we show that the dependence between the banking industry and changes in the yield spread increased significantly in the second time interval, we find no contagion effects from changes in the yield spread to returns of the banking system.