Systemic Risk Network of Chinese Financial Institutions

Abstract

The Chinese stock market crash in June 2015 has demonstrated necessary to improve understanding of systemic risk from the perspective of financial network. This study constructs a tail risk network to present overall systemic risk of Chinese financial institutions, given the macroeconomic and market externalities. Employing the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) method of high-dimensional models, our results show that firm’s idiosyncratic risk can be affected by its connectedness with other institutions. The risk spillover effect from other companies is the main driving factor of firm-specific risk, comparing with macroeconomic state, firm characteristics and historical price movement. The number of connections between institutions significantly increases during June 2014 to June 2016. Moreover, we utilize the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic to test significance of systemic risk beta based on tail risk and further rank the systemic risk contribution. Regulators could detect those firms that are most threatening to the stability of system.

Keywords: Systemic risk contribution; Tail risk network; Firm-specific risk; VaR

JEL Classification: C30; D85; G20