Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/210864 
Year of Publication: 
2019
Series/Report no.: 
ESRB Working Paper Series No. 89
Publisher: 
European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB), European System of Financial Supervision, Frankfurt a. M.
Abstract: 
Recent policy discussion includes the introduction of diversification requirements for sovereign bond portfolios of European banks. In this paper, we evaluate the possible effects of these constraints on risk and diversification in the sovereign bond portfolios of the major European banks. First, we capture the dependence structure of European countries' sovereign risks and identify the common factors driving European sovereign CDS spreads by means of an independent component analysis. We then analyze the risk and diversification in the sovereign bond portfolios of the largest European banks and discuss the role of "home bias", i.e., the tendency of banks to concentrate their sovereign bond holdings in their domicile country. Finally, we evaluate the effect of diversification requirements on the tail risk of sovereign bond portfolios and quantify the system-wide losses in the presence of fire-sales. Under our assumptions about how banks respond to the new requirements, demanding that banks modify their holdings to increase their portfolio diversification may mitigate fire-sale externalities, but may be ineffective in reducing portfolio risk, including tail risk.
Subjects: 
bank regulation
sovereign-bank nexus
sovereign risk
home bias
diversification
JEL: 
G01
G11
G21
G28
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
ISBN: 
978-92-9472-076-4
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
798.16 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.