Systemic Risk Contributions

We adopt a systemic risk indicator measured by the price of insurance against systemic financial distress and assess individual banks’ marginal contributions to the systemic risk. The methodology is applied using publicly available data to the 19 bank holding companies covered by the U.S. Supervisory Capital Assessment Program (SCAP), with the systemic risk indicator peaking around $1.1 trillion in March 2009. Our systemic risk contribution measure shows interesting similarity to and divergence from the SCAP loss estimates under stress test scenarios. In general, we find that a bank’s contribution to the systemic risk is roughly linear in its default probability but highly nonlinear with respect to institution size and asset correlation.