Banks are growing ever larger compared to their national economies. We show that increases in relative bank size (measured as a bank's liabilities divided by national GDP) are linked to banks displaying higher tail risk. This effect is not entirely due to risk channels that disproportionately...

We analyze whether four market-based measures of the global systemic importance of financial institutions offer early warning signals during three financial crises. The tests based on the 2007/2008 crisis show that only one measure (∆CoVaR) consistently adds predictive power to conventional...