We set up an early warning system for financial crises based on the Random Forrest approach. We use a novel set of predictors that comprises financial development indicators (e.g. levels of credit to GDP ratio) in addition to conventional imbalances measures (e.g. credit gaps). The evaluation of...

This paper provides an early warning indicator for bubbles in financial markets. The indicator is based on traditional unit root tests, more precisely on the augmented Dickey-Fuller test and may be used in a repeated manner with rolling samples. The performance of the indicator is tested...

From the financial supervisor's point of view, an early warning system involves an ex ante approach to regulation, targeted to predict and prevent crises. An efficient EWS allows timely ex ante policy action and can reduce the need for ex post regulation. This chapter builds on existing...

Banking crises are recurrent phenomena, often induced by ex-ante excessive bank risk-taking, which may be due to behavioral reasons (over-optimistic banks neglecting risks) and to agency problems between bank shareholders with debt-holders and taxpayers (banks understand high risk-taking). We...

We contribute to the better understanding of the key factors related to the operation of the banking system that led to the global financial crisis through the development of a dual earning warning model that explores the joint determination of the probability of a distressed bank to face a...

Asset encumbrance is a central concept in the context of banks’ liquidity crises, as it is associated with their capacity to obtain secured funding. This occasional paper summarises the work carried out by the task force on asset encumbrance, bringing together analyses by the ECB and those...

We develop and present a new methodology to detect regime changes within a sequence of sparse networks that have overlapping and evolving community structure. The core of the methodology is a non-negative matrix factorization that maximizes a Poisson likelihood subject to a penalty that accounts...

This paper proposes a framework for deriving early-warning models with optimal out-of-sample forecasting properties and applies it to predicting distress in European banks. The main contributions of the paper are threefold. First, the paper introduces a conceptual framework to guide the process...

In several recent studies unit root methods have been used in detection of financial bubbles in asset prices. The basic idea is that fundamental changes in the autocorrelation structure of relevant time series imply the presence of a rational price bubble. We provide cross-country evidence for...

Financial sector distress is a situation in which financial intermediation is either costly or impossible (or both) as proxied by tight financial conditions - high spreads, decline in equity value and high volatility. Tight financial conditions have been identified as a risk factor to the...