We study the effects of stock market volatility on risk-taking and financial crises by constructing a cross-country database spanning up to 211 years and 60 countries. Prolonged periods of low volatility have strong in-sample and out-of-sample predictive power over the incidence of banking...

Macroprudential stress testing (MaPST) is becoming firmly embedded in the post-crisis policy-frameworks of financial-sectors around the world. MaPSTs can offer quantitative, forward-looking assessments of the resilience of financial systems as a whole, to particularly adverse shocks. Therefore,...

The selection of upper order statistics in tail estimation is notoriously difficult. Methods that are based on asymptotic arguments, like minimizing the asymptotic MSE, do not perform well in finite samples. Here, we advance a data-driven method that minimizes the maximum distance between the...