Banking system stability: A cross-atlantic perspective

textabstractPaper prepared for the NBER project on “Risks of Financial Institutions”. We benefited from suggestions and criticism by many participants in the NBER project on “Risks of financial institutions”, in particular by the organizers Mark Carey (also involving Dean Amel and Allen Berger) and Rene Stulz, by our discussant Tony Saunders and by Patrick de Fontnouvelle, Gary Gorton, Andy Lo, Jim O’Brien and Eric Rosengren. Furthermore, we are grateful for comments we received at the 2004 European Finance Association Meetings in Maastricht, in particular by our discussant Marco da Rin and by Christian Upper, at the 2004 Ottobeuren seminar in economics, notably the thoughts of our discussant Ernst Baltensberger, of Friedrich Heinemann and of Gerhard Illing, as well as at seminars of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the ECB and the University of Frankfurt. Gabe de Bondt and David Marques Ibanez supported us enormously in finding yield spread data, Lieven Baele and Richard Stehle kindly made us aware of pitfalls in Datastream equity data. Very helpful research assistance by Sandrine Corvoisier, Peter Galos and Marco Lo Duca as well as editorial support by Sabine Wiedemann are gratefully acknowledged. Any views expressed only reflect those of the authors and should not be interpreted as the ones of the ECB or the Eurosystem. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. This paper derives indicators of the severity and structure of banking system risk from asymptotic interdependencies between banks’ equity prices. We use new tools available from multivariate extreme value theory to estimate individual banks’ exposure to each other (“contagion risk”) and to systematic risk. Moreover, by applying structural break tests to those measures we study whether capital markets indicate changes in the importance of systemic risk over time. Using data for the United States and the euro area, we can also compare banking system stability between the two largest economies in the world. Finally, for Europe we assess the relative importance of cross-border bank spillovers as compared to domestic bank spillovers. The results suggest, inter alia, that systemic risk in the US is higher than in the euro area, mainly as cross-border risks are still relatively mild in Europe. On both sides of the Atlantic systemic risk has increased during the 1990s