Assessing systemic risk due to fire sales spillover through maximum entropy network reconstruction

Fire sales are among the major drivers of market instability in modern financial systems. Due to iterated distressed selling and the associated price impact, initial shocks to some institutions can be amplified dramatically through the network induced by portfolio overlaps. In this paper, we develop a mathematical framework that allows us to investigate central characteristics that drive or hinder the propagation of distress. We investigate single systems as well as ensembles...

We develop a novel stress-test framework to monitor systemic risk in financial systems. The modular structure of the framework allows to accommodate for a variety of shock scenarios, methods to estimate interbank exposures and mechanisms of distress propagation. The main features are as follows. First, the framework allows to estimate and disentangle not only first-round effects (i.e. shock on external assets) and second-round effects (i.e. distress induced in the interbank n...

Drawing on recent contributions inferring financial interconnectedness from market data, our paper provides new insights on the evolution of the US financial industry over a long period of time by using several tools coming from network science. Following [1] a Time-Varying Parameter Vector AutoRegressive (TVP-VAR) approach on stock market returns to retrieve unobserved directed links among financial institutions, we reconstruct a fully dynamic network in the sense that conne...

Scale invariance, collective behaviours and structural reorganization are crucial for portfolio management (portfolio composition, hedging, alternative definition of risk, etc.). This lack of any characteristic scale and such elaborated behaviours find their origin in the theory of complex systems. There are several mechanisms which generate scale invariance but maximum entropy models are able to explain both scale invariance and collective behaviours. The study of the struct...

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the growing literature on financial networks has widely documented the predictive power of topological characteristics (e.g. degree centrality measures) to explain the systemic impact or systemic vulnerability of financial institutions. In this work, we show that considering alternative topological measures based on local sub-network environment improves our ability to identify systemic institutions. To provide empirical evidence, we ...

This paper provides a framework for modeling the financial system with multiple illiquid assets when liquidation of illiquid assets is caused by failure to meet a leverage requirement. This extends the network model of Cifuentes, Shin & Ferrucci (2005) which incorporates a single asset with fire sales and capital adequacy ratio. This also extends the network model of Feinstein (2015) which incorporates multiple illiquid assets with fire sales and no leverage ratios. We prove ...

In this article the problem of reconstructing the pattern of connection between agents from partial empirical data in a macro-economic model is addressed, given a set of behavioral equations. This systemic point of view puts the focus on distributional and network effects, rather than time-dependence. Using the theory of complex networks we compare several models to reconstruct both the topology and the flows of money of the different types of monetary transactions, while imp...

The question of how to stabilize financial systems has attracted considerable attention since the global financial crisis of 2007-2009. Recently, Beale et al. ("Individual versus systemic risk and the regulator's dilemma", Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 108: 12647-12652, 2011) demonstrated that higher portfolio diversity among banks would reduce systemic risk by decreasing the risk of simultaneous defaults at the expense of a higher likelihood of individual defaults. In practice, how...

The global financial system can be represented as a large complex network in which banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions are interconnected to each other through visible and invisible financial linkages. Recently, a lot of attention has been paid to the understanding of the mechanisms that can lead to a breakdown of this network. This can happen when the existing financial links turn from being a means of risk diversification to channels for the propagation of r...

We derive the default cascade model and the fire-sale spillover model in a unified interdependent framework. The interactions among banks include not only direct cross-holding, but also indirect dependency by holding mutual assets outside the banking system. Using data extracted from the European Banking Authority, we present the interdependency network composed of 48 banks and 21 asset classes. For the robustness, we employ three methods, called $\textit{Anan}$, $\textit{Ha\...