Analysis of tail dependence structure and risk spillover between cryptocurrencies

The analysis of the financial technologies introduction has proved that their application over-complicates the institutional structure of the global financial system. As a result, usual functional relationships cease to operate, new institutes and interdependencies appear, and systemic risks increase. In this context, the system instability increases, resulting in a transition to a new institutional status. The analysis of the financial technologies impact on the stability of financial system shows that the lack of institutional support for new financial technologies is the most important catalyst for the financial industry destabilization and the formation of financial bubbles in various market segments.
The ways to reduce the negative impact of financial technologies on the financial system stability (such as development of international prudential standards; revision of the licensing regime for financial companies; “regulatory sandboxes”, which test new technologies, business models and algorithms underlying the Fintech innovations; legal regulation of ownership of digital tokens; and clear definition of the blockchain technology in various areas of life, etc.) have been proposed.

The cryptocurrency market has witnessed significant growth in the past few months. The emergence of hundreds of new digital currencies and the huge increase in the prices of their leading representatives have attracted a lot of attention from investors. However, the financial characteristics of the cryptocurrency markets have not been systematically evaluated yet. As a consequence, there is currently no consensus on whether cryptocurrencies constitute an individual asset class or if they share substantial similarities to stocks, bonds, commodities or foreign exchange. Based on Markowitz et al. (2017) this paper aims to fill this lack of research by evaluating the cryptocurrency market based on seven requirements of an individual asset class. The authors find that the cryptocurrency market distinguishes itself remarkably from established asset classes in terms of risk and return. Additionally, the low correlation between the cryptocurrency markets and these established asset classes induces a diversification potential for investors, leading to more favorable risk/return profiles of their portfolios. But also the emergence of investment services and products provided by the financial industry and the increasingly cost-effective access to cryptocurrencies corroborate the conclusion that cryptocurrencies can be seen as an individual asset class.

Highly concentrated banking system risks and the cumulative effect due to their accumulation act as a driver for improving the macro-prudential policy implemented by central banks. For this reason, an effectively and comprehensively assessed systemic risk in the banking system is declared an express condition for the early detection of its production sources and blocking of potential spreading channels, reducing the possible implementation. In light of this, the article develops an approach to the aggregated systemic risk assessment and interpretation of its results. The proposed approach is based on the considered influence exerted by financial risks of systemically important banks on the destabilized banking system and interconnections between banks in the context of the possible crisis impulse spreading. The following steps should be accomplished to form an aggregated systemic risk indicator in the banking system. Firstly, the differentiation of systemically important banks by the degree of their systemic importance; secondly, an integral assessment of the bank operation riskiness within certain bank groups; thirdly, the cumulative composition of the corresponding integral indicators, taking into account their weighting coefficients based on two criteria, namely values of the systemic importance indicator differentiating the bank groups, and the correlation of their risks. Interpreting the quantitative measurement results with regard to the systemic risk in the banking system is followed by the recommendations below: the systemic risk grading into high, medium and low levels and the respective definition of the threshold aggregated systemic risk indicator value which informs about the possible systemic crisis when approached; justification of the selected supervision regime types (strengthened, moderate or weakened) for systemically important banks, depending on the riskiness level specific for their operation and the systemic importance degree. The developed approach to measuring the systemic risk by means of constructing an aggregated indicator and interpreting the obtained results was being tested considering the financial risk indicators of the systemically important banks in Ukraine during 2009–2018.