Systemic risk can be defined as the propensity of a financial institution to be undercapitalized
when the financial system as a whole is under-capitalized. It combines
the market capitalization of the firm, the sensitivity of its equity return to market
shocks, and its financial leverage. In this paper, we describe an econometric
approach designed to measure systemic risk for non-U.S. institutions. We extend
the approach developed by Brownlees and Engle (2010) to the case with several
factors explaining the dynamic of financial firms’ return and with asynchronicity
of the time zones. Our model combines a DCC model to estimate the dynamic of
the beta parameters, univariate GARCH models to estimate the dynamic of the
volatility of the error terms, and a dynamic t copula to estimate the dynamic of the
dependence structure between the innovations. We apply this methodology to the
194 largest European financial firms and estimate their systemic risk over the 2000-
2012 period. We find that banks and insurance companies bear about 80% and
20% of the systemic risk in Europe, whereas systemic risk is essentially unaffected
by financial services and real estate firms. Over the recent period, the systemically
riskiest countries are the UK and France, and the riskiest firms are Deutsche Bank
and BNP Paribas.