The Importance of Non-Systemically Important Banks—A Network-Based Analysis for China’s Banking System

Abstract

There is important theoretical and practical significance to scientifically identifying the systemic importance of banks for effectively preventing and controlling systemic risks in the banking system. Prevalent identification methods are biased because they only pay attention to measuring the systemic risk contribution of individual banks to the whole system in order to determine that bank’s systemic importance. Less attention is paid to the cascade effects of risk spillover among banks. This study proposes a novel method for measuring the cascade effects of risk spillover of banks and their contributions to systemic risks by building up a conditional tail risk network of China’s banking system. Different from previous analyses of systemic risks based on the identification and risk measurement of systemically important banks (SIBs), this paper focuses on analyzing the risk spillover effects of non-SIBs and their contributions to systemic risks by building up a conditional tail risk network of China’s banking system. Our empirical results show that some non-SIBs in China are more vulnerable to the shocks of systemic risk than SIBs, and that they are more likely to act as key intermediaries to transmit risk to SIBs, thereby triggering systemic risk. In view of this, we propose to identify key non-SIBs according to their risk spillover intensity because they are also systemically important. The market regulators not only need to pay attention to SIBs that are too big to fail, but also treat seriously the key intermediaries of “risk spillover too strong to fail” in the network in order to ensure the stability of the banking system.