Severe financial turbulences are driven by high impact and low probability events that are the characteristic hallmarks of systemic financial stress. These unlikely adverse events arise from the extreme tail of a probability distribution and are therefore very poorly captured by traditional...

The paper develops an early-warning model for predicting vulnerabilities leading to distress in European banks using both bank and country-level data. As outright bank failures have been rare in Europe, the paper introduces a novel dataset that complements bankruptcies and defaults with state...