Non-stationary Financial Risk Factors and Macroeconomic Vulnerability for the UK

ArXiv ID: 2404.01451 “View on arXiv”

Authors: Unknown

Abstract

Tracking the build-up of financial vulnerabilities is a key component of financial stability policy. Due to the complexity of the financial system, this task is daunting, and there have been several proposals on how to manage this goal. One way to do this is by the creation of indices that act as a signal for the policy maker. While factor modelling in finance and economics has a rich history, most of the applications tend to focus on stationary factors. Nevertheless, financial stress (and in particular tail events) can exhibit a high degree of inertia. This paper advocates moving away from the stationary paradigm and instead proposes non-stationary factor models as measures of financial stress. Key advantage of a non-stationary factor model is that while some popular measures of financial stress describe the variance-covariance structure of the financial stress indicators, the new index can capture the tails of the distribution. To showcase this, we use the obtained factors as variables in a growth-at-risk exercise. This paper offers an overview of how to construct non-stationary dynamic factors of financial stress using the UK financial market as an example.

Keywords: Financial Stress Indices, Non-Stationary Factor Models, Financial Stability, Growth-at-Risk, Vulnerability, Macro

Complexity vs Empirical Score

• Math Complexity: 7.0/10
• Empirical Rigor: 6.0/10
• Quadrant: Holy Grail
• Why: The paper employs advanced statistical methodologies like dynamic Bayesian non-stationary factor models and limit theorems to handle spurious correlations, indicating high mathematical complexity. It is heavily empirical, applying these methods to real-world UK financial data, performing a growth-at-risk backtest, and benchmarking against existing indices like CLIFS and CISS.

  flowchart TD
    A["Research Goal:<br>Model Non-Stationary Financial<br>Vulnerability for the UK"] --> B["Data Inputs:<br>UK Financial Market<br>Stress Indicators"]
    B --> C["Methodology:<br>Non-Stationary Dynamic<br>Factor Model"]
    C --> D["Computational Process:<br>Estimate Factors<br>Capturing Tail Distributions"]
    D --> E["Outcome:<br>UK Financial Stress Index<br>Extremes identified"]
    D --> F["Application:<br>Growth-at-Risk Exercise"]
    F --> G["Key Finding:<br>Non-stationary factors provide<br>superior vulnerability signals<br>vs. stationary models"]
    E --> G