Contemporaneous Transmission Networks and Systemic Risk in European Banking

Abstract

We study how contemporaneous equity-return transmission shapes systemic exposure among 51 listed European banks. Using a recursive non-Gaussian network model on volatility-standardized returns, we construct two market-capitalization-weighted measures based on direct and indirect transmission effects: the Systemic Impact Score (SIS), capturing a bank's potential influence on other institutions, and the Systemic Vulnerability Score (SVS), capturing its exposure to disturbances originating elsewhere. The fitted network reveals distinct transmitting and receiving roles, highlighting differences between institutions with substantial outward influence and those with high incoming sensitivity. Receiving roles are generally more reproducible than transmitting roles across repeated network discovery, and selected connections remain informative about lower-tail dependence in subsequent observations. Volatility standardization substantially reduces detected dependence among recovered shocks, although the full-sample model does not satisfy the designated criterion for supporting shock independence. Alternative recursive orderings also yield comparable directional tail asymmetries, limiting the extent to which these patterns validate a particular ordering. The results provide complementary measures of model-implied systemic transmission and vulnerability, with explicit attention to uncertainty and identification limits