Assessing and Mitigating Fire Sales Risk Under Partial Information

Abstract

We consider the problem of assessing and mitigating fire sales risk for banks under partial information. Using data from the European Banking Authority's stress tests, we consider the matrix of asset holdings of different banks. We first analyse fire sales risk under both full and partial information using different matrix reconstruction methods. We then investigate how well some policy interventions aimed at mitigating fire sales risk perform if they are applied based on only partial information. We compare the performance of policy interventions under full and partial information. We find that even under partial information, using suitable network reconstruction methods to decide on policy interventions can significantly mitigate risk from fire sales. Furthermore, we show that some interventions based on reconstructed networks significantly outperform ad hoc methods that decide on interventions only based on the size of an institution and do not account for overlapping portfolios.