The Reciprocal Relationship between Systemic Risk and Real Economic Activity

The contribution of this paper to the literature is three-fold: (1) it empirically uncovers the directionality and persistence of systemic risk surrounding "the great recession"; (2) it quantifies the reaction of the macro-economy to financial (banking) system shocks; and (3) it unearths feedback effects from the macro-economy to the (in)stability of a banking system. These contributions are attained by looking at the extremal dependence structure among banks, by presenting a multivariate framework for identifying and modeling their joint-tail distributions, and by constructing an aggregate system - wide distress index, a risk-stability index, which quantifies the systemic risk of a bank