There appears to be a consensus that the recent instability in global financial markets may be attributable in part to the failure of financial modeling. More specifically, current risk models have failed to properly assess the risks associated with large adverse stock price behavior. In this...

We propose a measure for systemic risk: CoVaR, the value at risk (VaR) of financial institutions conditional on other institutions being in distress. We define an institution's (marginal) contribution to systemic risk as the difference between CoVaR and the financial system's VaR. From our...