A New Heuristic Measure of Fragility and Tail Risks Application to Stress Testing

This paper presents a simple heuristic measure of tail risk, which is applied to individual bank stress tests and to public debt. Stress testing can be seen as a first order test of the level of potential negative outcomes in response to tail shocks. However, the results of stress testing can be mis...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Schmieder, Christian
Other Authors: Canetti, Elie, Kinda, Tidiane, Loukoianova, Elena
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Washington, D.C. International Monetary Fund 2012
Series:IMF Working Papers
Subjects:
Online Access:
Collection: International Monetary Fund - Collection details see MPG.ReNa
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300 |a 24 pages 
651 4 |a United States 
653 |a Credit 
653 |a Public debt 
653 |a Income 
653 |a Banks 
653 |a Finance 
653 |a Public finance & taxation 
653 |a Banks and banking 
653 |a Financial sector policy and analysis 
653 |a Personal income 
653 |a Debts, Public 
653 |a Solvency stress testing 
653 |a Mortgages 
653 |a Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions 
653 |a National accounts 
653 |a Money 
653 |a Financial risk management 
653 |a Financial Institutions and Services: General 
653 |a Macroeconomics 
653 |a Banking 
653 |a Depository Institutions 
653 |a Monetary economics 
653 |a Debt Management 
653 |a Micro Finance Institutions 
653 |a Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit: General 
653 |a Debt 
653 |a Financial Institutions and Services: Government Policy and Regulation 
653 |a General Financial Markets: General (includes Measurement and Data) 
653 |a Sovereign Debt 
653 |a Banks and Banking 
653 |a Public Finance 
653 |a Money and Monetary Policy 
653 |a Finance: General 
653 |a Stress testing 
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520 |a This paper presents a simple heuristic measure of tail risk, which is applied to individual bank stress tests and to public debt. Stress testing can be seen as a first order test of the level of potential negative outcomes in response to tail shocks. However, the results of stress testing can be misleading in the presence of model error and the uncertainty attending parameters and their estimation. The heuristic can be seen as a second order stress test to detect nonlinearities in the tails that can lead to fragility, i.e., provide additional information on the robustness of stress tests. It also shows how the measure can be used to assess the robustness of public debt forecasts, an important issue in many countries. The heuristic measure outlined here can be used in a variety of situations to ascertain an ordinal ranking of fragility to tail risks