Using extreme value theory to estimate the likelihood of banking sector failure

Abstract

The growing interest in management of credit risk and estimation of default probabilities has given rise to a range of more or less elaborate credit risk models. While these models work well for non-financial firms they are usually not very successful in capturing the financial strength of banks. As an answer to this, Hall and Miles suggest a simple approach of estimating bank failure probabilities based solely on their stock prices. This paper suggests an extension to the Hall and Miles model using extreme value theory and applies the extended model to the Swedish banking sector around the banking crisis of the early 1990s. The extended model captures very well the increased likelihood of a systemic banking sector failure around the peak of the crisis and it produces default probabilities that are more stable, more realistic and more consistent with Moody’s and Fitch rating implied default rates than probabilities from the original Hall and Miles model.     

商业银行如何应对房地产危机

上半年,由人民币升值引发的出口下降、高油价、高通胀、资源价格扭曲等宏观问题对中国整体经济形势带来较大影响,同时此前房地产市场各项宏观调控政策效果显现,呈现出与以往不同的变化特征.房地产开发依旧处于高位,但销售同比下滑较大,房地产市场已经由年初时的"价涨量跌"演变为目前的"价滞量跌" (2008年6月,70个大中城市房地产销售价格指数同比虽然上涨8.2%,但环比上升仅为0.1%),部分地区甚至出现"价量齐跌",部分前期涨幅较快的城市房价则出现了明显下跌(如深圳、广州、南京、成都等地,房地产销售价格指数环比持续下降,其中深圳连续7个月房价下跌,已逼近去年同期价格).房地产市场成交量不断萎缩在全国引发传导效应,供求双方观望明显.     

Banking crises and market discipline: International evidence

This paper analyzes the effect of banking crises on market discipline in an international sample of banks. We also evaluate how bank regulation, supervision, institutions, and crisis intervention policies shape the effect of banking crises on market discipline. We control for unobservable bank, country, and time specific effects using a panel data set of banks from 66 countries around 79 banking crises. The results suggest that on average market discipline weakens after a banking crisis. This weakening is higher in countries where bank regulation, supervision, and institutions promoted market discipline before the banking crisis, and where a more accommodative approach is adopted to resolve it.     

Money Market Pressure and the Determinants of Banking Crises

This article develops an index of money market pressure to identify banking crises. We define banking crises as periods in which there is excessive demand for liquidity in the money market. We begin with the theoretical foundation of this new method. With the newly defined crisis episodes, we examine the determinants of banking crises using data complied from 47 countries. We find that slowdown of real GDP, lower real interest rates, extremely high inflation, large fiscal deficits, and over-valued exchange rates tend to precede banking crises. The effects of monetary base growth on the probability of banking crises are negligible.     

A network model of systemic risk: stress testing the banking system1

Although there are many definitions of systemic risk, most agree that it manifests itself by an initial shock that results in the failure of one or more banks and then spreads out to the entire system by a contagion mechanism which can result in the failure of more banks in the system. Assuming that bank failures in the initial shock are randomly dependent on the failure probabilities of the individual banks and that the ensuing contagion process is deterministic, depending on interbank exposures, in this paper we propose a network model to analyse systemic risk in the banking system that, in contrast to other proposed models, seeks to obtain the probability distribution of losses for the financial system resulting from the shock/contagion process. Thus, calculating the probabilities of joint failures by simulation and assuming that the matrix of bilateral interbank exposures is known, we represent systemic risk in the financial system by means of a graph and use discrete modelling techniques to characterize the dynamics of contagion and corresponding losses within the network. The probability distribution of losses, risk profile for the Mexican banking system, is obtained through an efficient, complete enumeration procedure of all possible bank default events in the system. This, in turn, allows the use of the wide variety of well-established risk measures to describe the fragility of the financial system. Additionally, the model allows us to perform stress tests along both the bank default probabilities and the interbank exposures and is used to assess the risk of the Mexican banking system. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Market discipline in international banking regulation: Keeping the playing field level

The focus of this article is the debt market as a powerful disciplinarian source for large and complex banking organizations around the world. We empirically study the interactions between reinforcing banks’ market discipline and preserving a level playing field in international banking. Our approach consists of conducting cross-country comparisons of the secondary market prices sensitivity to market measures of bank risk (traditional and financial strength ratings). The results are generally consistent with the market discipline paradigm. However, much progress still needs to be made (especially in Japan and certain European countries) in order to make the level playing field principle compatible with the reinforcement of market discipline on an international level.     

A compound option approach to model the interrelation between banking crises and country defaults: The case of Hungary 2008

We analyze the Hungarian financial crisis of 2008 in a stochastic framework that advances structural credit risk models for country defaults: by applying compound option theory we consider payments for bailing-out the banking sector together with debt service payments in a joint crisis model. We estimate the model parameters by applying the time series maximum-likelihood approach of Duan (1994) on yield spreads of Hungarian Bonds. We find that difficulties in acquiring funds for debt servicing in combination with high outstanding debt triggered the crisis, rather than problems in the domestic banking sector. The estimated crisis probabilities dramatically rise during 2008.     

Contagion risk in the Australian banking and property sectors

The Australian banking system emerged from the global crisis virtually unhurt, with most banks still profitable, adequately capitalized, and with AA credit ratings. Are there any risks or vulnerabilities in this success story? This paper analyzes Australia’s systemic banking risk and attempts to determine if this risk increased with the recent global crisis and whether this risk is related to the downturn experienced in the real estate market. We use extreme value theory to measure banks’ and property firms’ univariate Value at Risk, as well as multivariate intra-sector and inter-sector contagion risks. Of the 13 sectors analyzed, we find that the property sector exhibits the highest level of extremal dependence with the banking sector. The credit crisis significantly increased the probability of a bank or property firm crashing. Moreover, contagion risks significantly increased not only within the banking and property sectors, but also between those sectors.     

Calculating the probability of failure of the Norwegian banking sector

We calculate the probability of failure of the Norwegian banking sector both before and after the Norwegian banking crisis. Thus unlike previous studies of this kind we choose a sample period and banking sector where there were significant numbers of bank failures. This approach therefore gives us a better indication of the quality of the calculated risk measure. Our results indicate evidence of a steep increase in the risk inherent in this sector beginning in 1984 following the deregulation of Norwegian banks in the mid 1980s. We also find that risk levels in the sector fall after 1992 and continue to fall to pre-1982 levels by the end of our sample in December 1995.     

Are Competitive Banking Systems More Stable?

Using the Panzar and Rosse H-statistic as a measure of competition in 45 countries, we find that more competitive banking systems are less prone to experience a systemic crisis and exhibit increased time to crisis. This result holds even when we control for banking system concentration, which is associated with higher probability of a crisis and shorter time to crisis. Our results indicate that competition and concentration capture different characteristics of banking systems, meaning that concentration is an inappropriate proxy for competition. The findings suggest that policies promoting competition among banks, if well executed, have the potential to improve systemic stability.     

Aggregate liquidity shortages, idiosyncratic liquidity smoothing and banking regulation

This paper develops a model of banking fragility driven by aggregate liquidity shortages. Inefficiencies arise from a failure of the interbank market to smooth the available liquidity in such a shortage. We find that a standard lender of last resort policy is ineffective in restoring efficiency as it leads to offsetting changes in the banks’ supply of liquidity. In contrast, subsidizing the purchase of assets from troubled banks increases welfare by improving the banks’ liquidity holdings. The first best, however, is achieved by redistributing existing liquidity from healthy to troubled banks in a crisis.     

Stock market risk in the financial crisis

In this paper, we look at the effect of the financial crisis from an angle overlooked to date in the finance literature by investigating composition effects arising from the financial crisis. A composition effect is a change in the market risk of a sector that is caused not by a direct change in that sector but by a change in another sector that affects the composition of the stock market. In the paper we investigate the pre and during crisis market risk of the industrial, banking and utilities sectors. Amongst other results, we find a positive relationship across the G12 countries between the increase in the market risk of industrials during the crisis and both the pre-crisis market risk of the banking sector and the scale of the systemic crisis in a country. The six G12 countries that experienced a major systematic banking crisis are amongst the seven countries with the largest increases in the market risk for industrials. Results drawn from our detailed analysis using US data are consistent with these findings. Finally, we show how the results add to our understanding of the linkages between the financial and real sector and conclude that composition effects of the financial crisis could have a significant chilling effect on investment in industrials, which is in addition to the effect of other linkages already documented.     

利率市场化背景下银行系统性危机的实证研究

从利率市场化的国际经验来看,无论是在发达国家还是发展中国家,其实施过程都容易导致不同程度的银行业危机。采用1973~2012年42个国家的面板数据,对利率市场化背景下的银行业危机进行的实证研究表明：利率市场化的推进将增加银行系统性危机发生的机率,特别是在存款利率市场化阶段,而严格的银行监管是抑制银行系统危机发生的有效方法;显性存款保险制度的设立无助于利率市场化后银行系统性风险的防范,甚至有可能会增加危机发生的机率;资本账户开放下进行利率市场化会增加银行系统危机发生的机率。利率市场化进程中允许开设民营银行不会增加银行系统危机的发生机率。     

扩张内需下的中国银行业：业务拓展与风险控制

当前全球金融危机正在蔓延并对实体经济产生影响,全球普遍采取了救市政策,为了减轻其对中国的影响,中国启动了大规模扩大内需的政策,这对中国银行业意味着什么?给中国银行业带来了哪些机遇和挑战?     

Measuring Liquidity Mismatch in the Banking Sector

This paper constructs a liquidity mismatch index (LMI) to gauge the mismatch between the market liquidity of assets and the funding liquidity of liabilities, for 2,882 bank holding companies over 2002 to 2014. The aggregate LMI decreases from +$4 trillion precrisis to ?$6 trillion in 2008. We conduct an LMI stress test revealing the fragility of the banking system in early 2007. Moreover, LMI predicts a bank's stock market crash probability and borrowing decisions from the government during the financial crisis. The LMI is therefore informative about both individual bank liquidity and the liquidity risk of the entire banking system.     

风险分担机制变迁、银行经营模式转型与银行安全

经济全球化过程中,金融市场横向风险分担机制侵蚀了银行中介跨期风险分担机制;一部分资金从银行中介转移到金融市场,致使商业银行传统盈利模式遭受冲击。银行必须从传统的存贷款经营模式转变为参与金融市场和衍生工具交易的、提供综合金融服务的现代经营模式。在这一转型过程中,如果转型过快或者银行不能适应变化,银行体系则可能积累大量风险,并导致银行危机。实证检验结果显示,风险分担机制变迁显著增加了银行危机的概率。     

Monitoring Financial Distress in a High-Stress Financial World: The Role of Option Prices as Bank Risk Metrics

The current financial crisis offers a unique opportunity to investigate the leading properties of market indicators in a stressed environment and their usefulness from a banking supervision perspective. One pool of relevant information that has been little explored in the empirical literature is the market for bank’s exchange-traded option contracts. In this paper, we first extract implied volatility indicators from the prices of option contracts on financial firms’ equity. We then examine empirically their ability to predict financial distress by applying survival analysis techniques to a sample of large US financial firms. We find that market indicators extracted from option prices significantly explain the survival time of troubled financial firms and do a better job in predicting financial distress than other time-varying covariates typically included in bank failure models. Overall, both accounting information and option prices contain useful information of subsequent financial problems and, more importantly, their combination produces good forecasts in a high-stress financial world.     

Macroeconomic adjustment and the history of crises in open economies

This paper investigates the impact of the history of crises on macroeconomic performance. We first study the impact of past banking crises on the probability of a future banking crisis. We do not detect a learning process from past banking crises. Countries that have already experienced one banking crisis generally have a higher likelihood of experiencing another crisis; and the depth of the crisis does not appear to be affected by the previous historical experience with crisis events. Evidence also suggests that, in middle-income countries, higher de jure capital account openness is associated with lower likelihood of a banking crisis, a lower ratio of non-performing loans during the crisis, and higher levels of forgone output in the crisis' aftermath. In contrast, we find that past crisis experience has a significant impact on savings. When facing considerable political risk, the past does seem to matter – countries with more people who were exposed, over their lifetime, to larger disasters will tend to save more. This association, however, does not hold for countries with more stable political systems.     

Nontraditional banking activities and bank failures during the financial crisis

We test whether income from nontraditional banking activities contributed to the failures of hundreds of U.S. commercial banks during the financial crisis. Estimates from a multi-period logit model indicate that the probability of distressed bank failure declined with pure fee-based nontraditional activities such as securities brokerage and insurance sales, but increased with asset-based nontraditional activities such as venture capital, investment banking and asset securitization. Banks that engaged in risky nontraditional activities also tended to take risk in their traditional lines of business, suggesting that deregulation was neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for bank failure during the crisis.     

Bank-to-bank lending channel and the transmission of bank liquidity shocks: Evidence from France

Good liquidity is essential for the banking system to function properly and supply credit to the real sector. However, several banks all over the world face large shocks to their liquidity supply due to numerous factors. This study contributes to the literature on the transmission of liquidity shocks by investigating the bank-to-bank lending behavior of French banks during the global financial crisis (2008 and 2009). In addition, we examine the factors strongly influencing the liquidity of the interbank deposits market. First, using a fixed-effects model on a sample of 85 French banks for the period from 2005 to 2010, we find that the deposits channel plays an important role in the transmission of liquidity shocks across the banking system. Second, we use difference-in-difference methodology to study the effects of liquidity shock on bank lending. Our results show that French banks reduced their bank-to-bank lending significantly during the financial crisis period. Moreover, our results suggest that the reduction could have been due to deposit activities.