Bank Size And Systemic Risk

The proposed SDN documents the evolution of bank size and activities over the past 20 years. It discusses whether this evolution can be explained by economies of scale or “too big to fail” subsidies. The paper then presents evidence on the extent to which bank size and market-based activities contribute to systemic risk. The paper concludes with policy messages in the area of capital regulation and activity restrictions to reduce the systemic risk posed by large banks. The analysis of the paper complements earlier Fund work, including SDN 13/04 and the recent GFSR chapter on “too big to fail” subsidies, and its policy message is in line with this earlier work.

To date, an operational measure of systemic risk capturing non-linear tail comovement between system-wide and individual bank returns has not yet been developed. This paper proposes an extension of the so-called CoVaR measure that captures the asymmetric response of the banking system to positive and negative shocks to the market-valued balance sheets of individual banks. For the median of our sample of U.S. banks, the relative impact on the system of a fall in individual market value is sevenfold that of an increase. Moreover, the downward bias in systemic risk from ignoring this asymmetric pattern increases with bank size. The conditional tail comovement between the banking system and a top decile bank which is losing market value is 5.4 larger than the unconditional tail comovement versus only 2.2 for banks in the bottom decile. The asymmetric model also produces much better estimates and fitting, and thus improves the capacity to monitor systemic risk. Our results suggest that ignoring asymmetries in tail interdependence may lead to a severe underestimation of systemic risk in a downward market.

This book provides a comprehensive methodology to measure systemic risk in many of its facets and dimensions based on state-of-the-art risk assessment methods. Systemic risk has gained attention in the public eye since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. The bankruptcy of the fourth-biggest bank in the USA raised questions whether banks that are allowed to become “too big to fail” and “too systemic to fail” should carry higher capital surcharges on their size and systemic importance. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008-2009 was followed by the Sovereign Debt Crisis in the euro area that saw the first Eurozone government de facto defaulting on its debt and prompted actions at international level to stem further domino and cascade effects to other Eurozone governments and banks. Against this backdrop, a careful measurement of systemic risk is of utmost importance for the new capital regulation to be successful and for sovereign risk to remain in check. Most importantly, the book introduces a number of systemic fragility indicators for banks and sovereigns that can help to assess systemic risk and the impact of macroprudential and microprudential policies.

"Levy-Yeyati, Martinez Peria, and Schmukler show that systemic risk exerts a significant impact on the behavior of depositors, sometimes overshadowing their responses to standard bank fundamentals. Systemic risk can affect market discipline both regardless of and through bank fundamentals. First, worsening systemic conditions can directly threaten the value of deposits by way of dual agency problems. Second, to the extent that banks are exposed to systemic risk, systemic shocks lead to a future deterioration of fundamentals not captured by their current values. Using data from the recent banking crises in Argentina and Uruguay, the authors show that market discipline is indeed quite robust once systemic risk is factored in. As systemic risk increases, the informational content of past fundamentals declines. These episodes also show how few systemic shocks can trigger a run irrespective of ex-ante fundamentals. Overall, the evidence suggests that in emerging economies, the notion of market discipline needs to account for systemic risk. This paper--a product of the Finance Team, Development Research Group--is part of a larger effort in the group to study market discipline"--World Bank web site.

The recent financial crisis has shown how interconnected the financial world has become. Shocks in one location or asset class can have a sizable impact on the stability of institutions and markets around the world. But systemic risk analysis is severely hampered by the lack of consistent data that capture the international dimensions of finance. While currently available data can be used more effectively, supervisors and other agencies need more and better data to construct even rudimentary measures of risks in the international financial system. Similarly, market participants need better information on aggregate positions and linkages to appropriately monitor and price risks. Ongoing initiatives that will help in closing data gaps include the G20 Data Gaps Initiative, which recommends the collection of consistent bank-level data for joint analyses and enhancements to existing sets of aggregate statistics, and the enhancement to the BIS international banking statistics.

In this paper we identify some of the main factors behind systemic risk in a set of international large-scale complex banks using the novel CoVaR approach. We find that short-term wholesale funding is a key determinant in triggering systemic risk episodes. In contrast, we find no evidence that a larger size increases systemic risk within the class of large global banks. We also show that the sensitivity of system-wide risk to an individual bank is asymmetric across episodes of positive and negative asset returns. Since short-term wholesale funding emerges as the most relevant systemic factor, our results support the Basel Committee's proposal to introduce a net stable funding ratio, penalizing excessive exposure to liquidity risk.

Systemic Risk: History, Measurement and Regulation presents an overview of this emerging form of risk from a global perspective. Systemic risks endanger entire financial systems, not just individual financial institutions. In this volume, the authors review how systemic risk has evolved over the last 40 years across continents to come to the forefront of regulatory attention. They then discuss transmissions channels, provide a review of systemic risk measures, and describe new regulations that have been introduced, as well as the theory and practice of financial stability committees that have been set up internationally. Overall, the book provides a practical guide to understand, identify, assess and control systemic risk.While the financial research on systemic risk has strongly increased since the events of 2008, this book is a first in providing a detailed yet concise overview of the topic, covering the history of systemic risk, its measurement, and its regulation. The authors provide both academic and practitioner-oriented insights, and draw on their different regions of expertise to provide a global perspective on systemic risk.

The financial crisis that erupted in 2007 has brought the issues of the size, risk, and regulation of banks to the attention of a wide audience. It is difficult to open a broadsheet newspaper or a business magazine without being confronted with some aspect of bank behaviour, be it their risk levels, bankers' excessive rewards, the intertwining of bank and sovereign risk, or how they should be regulated to avoid problems in the future. In Europe, the recent and on-going crisis has demonstrated that the European Union (EU) was institutionally ill-prepared to manage a financial crisis, especially one involving large cross-border institutions which are systemically important to a number of countries. This book aims at integrating and synthesizing the various perspectives on the size, risk, and governance of banking as applied to the European markets, providing fresh insights and new analysis of the empirical data. The book is divided into three main sections. The first provides an overview of how the size of banking firms affects stability in the European banking sector, reviewing the quantitative empirical literature and offering new insights as to whether bank size motivates risk-taking where explicit or implicit 'too-big-to fail' policies shield bank creditors from market discipline. The next section discusses the debates relating to each of the different elements of risk in European banking, including new insights from a large dataset of European bank risk in different institutional contexts. The third section focuses on regulation, board monitoring, and opacity in European banking, employing a unique and hand collected dataset on the governance of European banks, as well as data on U.S. banks as a benchmark. The final chapter critically reviews the new insights gained from the chapters above, while offering policy implications as regards the role of size, risk and governance in European banking.