A financial stability index for Colombia

The imbalances of the financial systems have showed the vast economic and social costs generated by financial instability. As a consequence, the development of stress indexes has spread as an alternative to assess the soundness of financial systems. The aim of this paper is to construct a continuous and quantifiable index with the capacity of establishing the stress level of the Colombian financial system as a function of profitability, liquidity and probability of default. Results show that the index determines effectively the stress level of the system. In addition, we performed forecasts of the financial stability index using macroeconomics variables.