The Systemic Risk of European Banks During the Financial and Sovereign Debt Crises

European banks became a source of risk to global financial markets during the financial crisis and attention to the European banking sector increased during the sovereign debt crisis. To measure the systemic risk of European banks, we calculate a distress insurance premium (DIP), which integrates the characteristics of bank size, probability of default, and correlation. Based on this measure, the systemic risk of European banks reached its height in late 2011 around €500 billion. We find that this was largely due to sovereign default risk. The DIP methodology is also used to measure the systemic contribution of individual banks. This approach identifies the large systemically important European banks, but Italian and Spanish banks as a group notably increased in systemic importance during the sample period. Bank-specific fundamentals like capital-asset ratios predict the one-year-ahead systemic risk contributions.

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