Global Systemically Important Financial Institutions : A Structural VAR Approach

Systemic importance of a financial institution is measured as the additional tail loss induced into the system when the financial institution falls into distress due to its own structural shocks. The use of a structural approach is a step towards addressing a key concern in systemic risk literature, "Is the firm impacting the market, or is the market impacting the firm?"The identification exploits "too-big-to-fail" restrictions which are implicitly imposed when a dynamic factor model is assumed, and the data reveals "too-interconnected-to-fail", thereby incorporating the two key considerations of systemic importance. Over 21,000 firms listed globally are modelled jointly as a system. Compared to other structural approaches, we use only public data. Even so, the model's output relates to actual firm-specific bailout events, and also reflects interactions of firms linked to the same supply chain. In addition, we show how Basel's list of global systemically important banks can be interpreted in our framework