Systemic risk in Danish banks: Implementing SRISK in a Danish context

The market-based SRISK measure introduced in Brownlees and Engle (2015) is used to measure the level of systemic risk in Danish banks and the Danish financial sector as a whole for the period 2005-15. The systemic risk contribution for a bank is measured as its propensity to be undercapitalized when a crisis occurs, i.e. when the system as a whole is undercapitalized. We find that SRISK was a very good predictor of which banks that needed public capital injections during the financial crisis of 2007-09 and that the market data generally provides useful information in times of crisis. According to SRISK, the Danish financial sector is well-capitalized as of end-2015.