Posted

September 24, 2012 03:36:27 PM

Date

2012-08

Author

Paolo Guarda, Abdelaziz Rouabah, and John Theal

Affiliation

Banque Centrale du Luxembourg

Title

An MVAR framework to capture extreme events in macro-prudential stress tests

Summary /
Abstract

Severe financial turbulences are driven by high impact and low probability events that are the characteristic hallmarks of systemic financial stress. These unlikely adverse events arise from the extreme tail of a probability distribution and are therefore very poorly captured by traditional econometric models that rely on the assumption of normality. In order to address the problem of extreme tail events, we adopt a mixture vector autoregressive (MVAR) model framework that allows for a multi-modal distribution of the residuals. A comparison between the respective results of a VAR and MVAR approach suggests that the mixture of distributions allows for a better assessment of the effect that adverse shocks have on counterparty credit risk, the real economy and banks’ capital requirements. Consequently, we argue that the MVAR provides a more accurate assessment of risk since it captures the fat tail events often observed in time series of default probabilities.

Keywords

Stress testing, MVAR, tier 1 capital ratio, counterparty risk, Luxembourg banking sector

URL

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ecb:ecbwps:20121464&r=cba

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