Assessing financial distress dependencies in OTC markets: a new approach by Trade Repositories data

After the recent financial crisis, it is undoubtedly recognized the importance of assessing not only the risk of distress for a single \financial entity", but also the distress dependencies between the different \entities", where by \entities" we mean in a broad sense any relevant cluster of products, risk factors, counterparties. In this paper, we focus on the Interest Rate Swap (IRS) segment as a significant fraction of the OTC market. We define a distress indicator by combining some distress drivers, such as averaged volumes, liquidity, volatility and bid-ask proxies. Hence, we analyse the distress dependencies among sub-markets identified by the segmentation of the IRS market according to contractual and financial features. We try to combine in an innovative way some new ingredients, namely the more granular data on OTC derivatives available from the trade repositories along with the classical JPoD approach introduced in the recent years by the IMF for studying the distress interdependence structure among financial institutions. The proposed technique seems to be quite promising. Indeed, the results are quite close to the practical intuition. At the best of our knowledge, this work is the first empirical study based on trade repositories' data for assessing systemic risk.