HEAM Jean Cyprien

This thesis contributes to the analysis and measure of systemic risk through four chapters. In the first chapter, we discuss the notion of systemic risk and detail the methodological issues of modeling. The second chapter proposes a structural model of solvency contagion. Within an equilibrium model, we measure the contagion by identifying the direct effect of an external shock and its propagation. In the third chapter, we provide a pricing framework for financial institution’s debt encompassing the effect of interconnections between institutions. We compute a risk premium specific to interconnections. In the last chapter, we model the joint effects of the shocks on the asset side and on the liability side of a financial institution. We adapt the usual risk measures to pinpoint the funding liquidity risk and the market liquidity risk. Lastly, we explain how to set the level and the composition of regulatory reserves to control for default risk.

Being active in both the insurance sector and the banking sector, financial conglomerates intrinsically increase the interconnections between the banking sector and the insurance sector. We address two main concerns about financial conglomerates using a unique database on bilateral exposures between 21 French financial institutions. First, we investigate to what extent to which the insurers that are part of financial conglomerates differ from pure insurers. Second, we show that in the presence of sovereign risk, the components of a financial conglomerate are better off than if they were distinct entities. Our empirical findings bring a new perspective to the previous results of the literature based on using different types of data.

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This thesis contributes in four chapters to the analysis and measurement of systemic risk. The first chapter discusses the notion of systemic risk and details the methodological issues of its modeling. The second chapter proposes a structural model of solvency contagion. This equilibrium model allows us to measure the risk of contagion by distinguishing the direct effect of a shock from its propagation. In the third chapter, we provide a framework for valuing an institution's debt that takes into account the effect of interconnections between institutions. We calculate a risk premium specifically related to interconnections. In the fourth chapter, we model the joint effects of shocks to the assets and liabilities of a financial institution. We adapt standard risk measures to identify market, funding, and market liquidity risks. Finally, we explain how to determine the composition and level of regulatory reserves to limit default risk.

We investigate the consequences of banks' liquidity hoarding behaviour for the stability of the financial system by proposing a new model of banking contagion through two channels, bilateral exposures and funding shortage. Inspired by the key role of liquidity hoarding in the 2007-2009 financial crisis, we incorporate banks' hoarding behaviour in a standard Iterative Default Cascade algorithm to compute the propagation of a common market shock through a banking system. In addition to potential solvency contagion, a market shock leads to banks liquidity hoarding that may generate problems of short-term funding for other banks. As an empirical exercise, we apply this model to the French banking system. Relying on data on banks bilateral exposures collected by France' Prudential Supervisory Authority, the French banking sector appears resilient to the combination of an initial market shock (losses on marked-to-market assets) and the resulting solvency and liquidity contagion. Moreover, the model gauges the relative weight of the various factors in the total loss.