Interconnectedness among banks is a key distinguishing feature of the banking system. It helps mitigate liquidity problems but on the other hand, acts as a curse in propagating systemic risk at times of distress. Thus, as banks cannot function in isolation, this study uses the Contemporary Theory of Networks to examine banking competition in India for five distinct economic phases, emphasizing upon the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This paper proposes a Market Power Network Index (MPNI), which uses network parameters to measure banks’ market power. This network structure shows a formation of bank clusters that are involved in competition. Specifically, network properties, such as centroid, average path length, the distance of a node from the centroid, the total number of connections in the inter-bank market, and network density, do go on to explain banking competition. It is interesting to note that crisis periods witness a lower level of competition, with GFC bearing the least competition. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic shows a lower trend, but it is of a higher magnitude than GFC. It was also found that big-sized, profitable, capital adequate, and public banks dominate the banking system. Notably, this study was conducted on a sample of 33 listed Indian banks from April 2008 to December 2020.
Purpose
This study aims to analyse the systemic risk emitted by all publicly listed commercial banks in a key emerging economy, India.
Design/methodology/approach
The study makes use of the Tobias and Brunnermeier (2016) estimator to quantify the systemic risk (ΔCoVaR) that banks contribute to the system. The methodology addresses a classification problem based on the probability that a particular bank will emit high systemic risk or moderate systemic risk. The study applies machine learning models such as logistic regression, random forest (RF), neural networks and gradient boosting machine (GBM) and addresses the issue of imbalanced data sets to investigate bank’s balance sheet features and bank’s stock features which may potentially determine the factors of systemic risk emission.
Findings
The study reports that across various performance matrices, the authors find that two specifications are preferred: RF and GBM. The study identifies lag of the estimator of systemic risk, stock beta, stock volatility and return on equity as important features to explain emission of systemic risk.
Practical implications
The findings will help banks and regulators with the key features that can be used to formulate the policy decisions.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the existing literature by suggesting classification algorithms that can be used to model the probability of systemic risk emission in a classification problem setting. Further, the study identifies the features responsible for the likelihood of systemic risk.
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