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The issue of systemic risk regulation and management has gained substantial attention following the latest financial crisis. In the case of the EU it became crucial to deal with the systemic risk problem on a supranational level since the banking sectors of the member countries are highly integrated. While substantial measures have been undertaken to mitigate systemic risk in the EU, the discussion of further reforms continues. This study's goal is to assess basic indicators of systemic risk in the EU banking sector by using three complementary methods: a forward-looking stock market data analysis, an EU-stress test analysis for systemically important banks, and an empirical investigation of the relation between banking regulation and systemic risk as measured by bank balance sheet indicators. The results lead to a recommendation of further necessary regulatory reforms, which appear in the conclusion.

The article investigates the role of a broad array of banking regulatory features in shaping the resilience of European Union countries to the latest financial crisis. The study considers the level of output, the yearly averages of the month-to-month government bond yield spreads, and the yearly variance of these spreads as performance measures. Moreover, the author considers house price growth, public debt levels, financial openness and the extent of private credit as basic factors determining the vulnerability of EU countries to the crisis. The empirical specification is based on dynamic panel data models, which are estimated using the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). The basic regressions including the main predictors of the crisis are expanded to include interaction terms between banking regulatory measures and the specified predictors. This approach is aimed at seizing the marginal effect of banking regulation on the impact of the respective factors of the crisis. The sample encompasses 25 EU countries during the period of 2004-2009. The choice of the time sample is aimed at capturing the developments in the economic cycle preceding the crisis, which affected the performance of EU economies during the downturn of 2007-2009. To capture the effect of the crisis itself, time effects are computed. The results point to a significant role of banking regulatory features in shaping the performance of EU countries as well as to their mitigating effect on the factors driving the latest financial crisis. JEL classification codes: F36, G15, G28Artykuł wpłynął do druku 4 marca 2013 r.

The latest financial crisis has exposed substantial weaknesses in the bank risk models used by national regulators as well as the Basel Accords. The study is aimed at presenting the evolution and critique of risk measures and risk models in banking, with a special focus on the dynamically developing area of systemic risk measures. A discussion of the features of the respective measures allows us to draw conclusions for banking regulations based on the analyzed models and to present the main challenges for regulators in terms of bank risk measurement. The study shows that substantial challenges for regulators include compensating for the drawbacks of the Value at Risk (VaR) and expected shortfall risk models, resolving the pro-cyclicality in risk modeling, improving the techniques of stress testing, and addressing the fallacy of composition in banking (i.e., to model risk from a systemic point of view and not only from the perspective of an individual bank). As the discussion concerning proper risk measurement in regulatory frameworks, such as the Basel Accord or the European Banking Authority's (EBA) rules is in progress, the topic seems to be of particular importance; moreover, measures of systemic risk are not yet a subject of regulation. While measuring individual bank risk is a complex process in itself, the difficulties in estimation and modeling increase dramatically when one takes systemic bank risk into account. This study is aimed at presenting the evolution and critique of risk measures

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