Credit Risk Interconnectedness: What Does the Market Really Know?

Abstract

Reproduction permitted only if source is stated. ISBN Non-technical summary Research questionThe identification and quantification of the systemic component of financial risk require an in-depth understanding of the channels through which shocks can spread and amplify, thereby jeopardizing the stability of a financial system. Our understanding of these links as a whole is, however, hampered by the absent comprehension of the key determinants of financial institutions' interconnections. This has been due to the lack of comprehensive datasets on a from-whom-to-whom basis that are sufficient for analyses of this kind. Therefore, a number of recent studies have suggested network estimation techniques based on market information to overcome this hurdle. In this paper, we examine the relationship between market-based measures of credit risk interconnectedness and actual common exposures of banks through their funding and securities holdings. ContributionWe use CDS prices to measure market-implied interconnectedness between banks employing a correlation-based approach and use a unique proprietary dataset for the period 2006-2013 to evaluate how much market information-based measures capture actual balance sheet linkages and risks associated with banks' funding, security investment, and credit provision behavior. ResultsTwo main results emerge from our analysis. First, we find that our market-based interconnectedness measure strongly reflects the information on banks' exposure to the wholesale funding market and assets associated with securities investments and credit supply. Second, we show that the relation between our market-based interconnectedness measure and the balance sheet positions exhibits asymmetries both over time and cross-sectionally. For instance, we find that interbank lending is a relevant driver of our measure during crisis times as other sources of financing become hard to obtain. And, bank pairs with higher exposures to the troubled security classes show up as more interconnected. On the contrary, commonality in securities investments related to crisis-unaffected security classes does not induce higher dependency. These results show that market information-based measures of interdependence can serve well as a risk monitoring tool in the absence of disaggregated highfrequency bank fundamental data. Abstract We analyze the relation between market-based credit risk interconnectedness among banks during the crisis and the associated balance sheet linkages via funding and securities holdings. For identification, we use a proprietary dataset that has the funding positions of banks at the bank-to-bank level for 2006-13 in conjunction with investments of banks at the security level and the credit register from Germany. We find asymmetries both cross-sectionally and over time: when banks face di culties to raise funding, the interbank lending a↵ects market-based bank interconnectedness. Moreover, banks with investments in securities related to troubled classes have a higher credit risk interconnectedness. ...

Robust and sparse banking network estimation

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