Systemic Risk Allocation for Systems with A Small Number of Banks

This paper provides a new estimation method for the marginal expected shortfall (MES) based on multivariate extreme value theory. In contrast to previous studies, the method does not assume specific dependence structure among bank equity returns and is applicable to both large and small systems. Furthermore, our MES estimator inherits the theoretical additive property. Thus, it serves as a tool to allocate systemic risk. We apply the proposed method to 29 global systemically important financial institutions (G-SIFIs) to evaluate the cross sections and dynamics of the systemic risk allocation. We show that allocating systemic risk according to either size or individual risk is imperfect and can be unfair. Between the allocation with respect to individual risk and that with respect to size, the former is less unfair. On the time dimension, both allocation fairness across all the G-SIFIs has decreased since 2008.
 
Keywords: Systemic risk allocation;  marginal expected shortfall; systemically important financial institutions; extreme value theory.
JEL Classification Numbers: G21;  C14; G32.

Working paper no. 378