Systemic Risk with Exchangeable Contagion: Application to the European Banking System

Abstract

We propose a model and an estimation technique to distinguish systemic risk and contagion in credit risk. The main idea is to assume, for a set of $d$ obligors, a set of $d$ idiosyncratic shocks and a shock that triggers the default of all them. All shocks are assumed to be linked by a dependence relationship, that in this paper is assumed to be exchangeable and Archimedean. This approach is able to encompass both systemic risk and contagion, with the Marshall-Olkin pure systemic risk model and the Archimedean contagion model as extreme cases. Moreover, we show that assuming an affine structure for the intensities of idiosyncratic and systemic shocks and a Gumbel copula, the approach delivers a complete multivariate distribution with exponential marginal distributions. The model can be estimated by applying a moment matching procedure to the bivariate marginals. We also provide an easy visual check of the good specification of the model. The model is applied to a selected sample of banks for 8 European countries, assuming a common shock for every country. The model is found to be well specified for 4 of the 8 countries. We also provide the theoretical extension of the model to the non-exchangeable case and we suggest possible avenues of research for the estimation.