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Working Paper
A framework for assessing the systemic risk of major financial institutions
In this paper we propose a framework for measuring and stress testing the systemic risk of a group of major financial institutions. The systemic risk is measured by the price of insurance against financial distress, which is based on ex ante measures of default probabilities of individual banks and forecasted asset return correlations. Importantly, using realized correlations estimated from high-frequency equity return data can significantly improve the accuracy of forecasted correlations. Our stress testing methodology, using an integrated micro-macro model, takes into account dynamic ...
Working Paper
The systemic risk of European banks during the financial and sovereign debt crises
We propose a hypothetical distress insurance premium (DIP) as a measure of the European banking systemic risk, which integrates the characteristics of bank size, default probability, and interconnectedness. Based on this measure, the systemic risk of European banks reached its height in late 2011 around ? 500 billion. We find that the sovereign default spread is the factor driving this heightened risk in the banking sector during the European debt crisis. The methodology can also be used to identify the individual contributions of over 50 major European banks to the systemic risk measure. ...
Working Paper
Assessing the systemic risk of a heterogeneous portfolio of banks during the recent financial crisis
This paper extends the approach of measuring and stress-testing the systemic risk of a banking sector in Huang, Zhou, and Zhu (2009) to identifying various sources of financial instability and to allocating systemic risk to individual financial institutions. The systemic risk measure, defined as the insurance cost to protect against distressed losses in a banking system, is a risk-neutral concept of capital based on publicly available information that can be appropriately aggregated across different subsets. An application of our methodology to a portfolio of twenty-two major banks in Asia ...
Working Paper
Systemic risk contributions
We adopt a systemic risk indicator measured by the price of insurance against systemic financial distress and assess individual banks' marginal contributions to the systemic risk. The methodology is applied using publicly available data to the 19 bank holding companies covered by the U.S. Supervisory Capital Assessment Program (SCAP), with the systemic risk indicator peaking around $1.1 trillion in March 2009. Our systemic risk contribution measure shows interesting similarity to and divergence from the SCAP expected loss measure. In general, we find that a bank's contribution to the systemic ...
Working Paper
Macroeconomic News Announcements, Systemic Risk, Financial Market Volatility and Jumps
This paper studies financial market volatility and jump responses to macroeconomic news announcements. Based on two decades of high-frequency data, we finds that there are significantly more jumps on news days than on no-news days, with the bond market being more responsive than the equity market, and nonfarm payroll employment being the most influential news. Both the first moment of news surprises and the second moments of disagreement and uncertainty affect financial market responses, with their impact significance changing over different market and response types. Market responses to news ...