Measuring Systemic Financial Stress and its Impact on the Macroeconomy

This paper proposes a general statistical framework for systemic financial stress indexes. Several existing index designs can be represented as special cases. We introduce a daily variant of the ECB's CISS for the euro area and the US. The CISS aggregates a representative set of stress indicators using their time-varying cross-correlations as systemic weights, like portfolio risk is computed from the risk characteristics of individual assets. A bootstrap algorithm delivers test statistics. A linear VAR suggests that systemic stress is the main cause behind the Great Recession, while its contribution to the Covid-19 crisis appears limited. A quantile VAR features stronger real effects of financial stress in the worst states of the economy.