Early warning system of finance stress for India

Abstract

This paper develops a composite Financial Sector Stress Index (FSSI) for the Indian financial system as a whole by combining three sub-indices for currency markets, the banking sector and the stock market, to gauge the level of financial stress in the Indian financial system. Such a continuous-valued index can be used to track the varying magnitude and dynamics of financial stress in the country over time. The FSSI provides an ordinal measure of stress in the financial system. Changes in the FSSI are useful in assessing whether financial stress is rising or falling, and in ascertaining extreme events in the financial system. The paper, then, objectively identifies extreme stress periods in the financial system based on movements of the index. We recognise that such extreme/tail events pose special econometric challenges as they are rare events but with a big impact. Hence, we use a more robust and analytically sound technique of Extreme Value Theory (EVT) to identify extreme events in the financial system. Once the extreme stress events are identified, we use a binary dependent variable model (logit model) to estimate the impact of various macroeconomic and financial variables on the probability of extreme stress in the financial system.