Stress Test of Banks in India: A VAR Approach

Banking crisis have serious repercussion causing loss of household savings and decline in confidence and soundness in the banking sector. The present study is an attempt to analyze this aspect in light of the challenges of financial sector reforms faced by banks in India . Stress test of banks operating in India is undertaken to identify factors that adversely influence banks’ non-performing assets (NPA) which is the key indicator of banks’ soundness. We examine the response of bank’s NPA to unexpected shocks from external and domestic macroeconomic factors namely interest rate, exchange rate, GDP. NPAs are regressed in Vector Auto Regressive model on a set of macroeconomic variables with quarterly data from 1997 to 2012 to examine whether there is divergence in the response across the four types ownership: public, old private, new private, and foreign. Granger Causality, IRF and FEVD are used to verify the VAR results. Interest rate significantly impairs asset quality for all banks in two-way causality. Exchange rate, net foreign institutional investor flow and deposits Granger cause public banks’ NPA. GDP gap Granger cause NPA in old private and foreign banks. IRF show banks are vulnerable to inflation shock requiring 8 quarters to stabilize. The stress test clearly demonstrates that all banks need to re-capitalize and improve asset quality.