The impact of treasury operations and off-balance-sheet credit business on commercial bank credit risk

Qiwei Xie, Lu Cheng, Jingyu Li and Xiaolong Zheng

Abstract

Current research on commercial bank credit risk mainly focuses on the risk of loans and advances without considering the treasury operations and off-balance-sheet credit business that also carry credit risk. Ignoring the correlation between diverse risk factors results in the biased integration of credit risk. In this work, we aggregate the credit risk of commercial banks based on three risk factors using a vine copula. Our empirical results show that banks that are not global systemically important banks are confronted with higher credit risk than global systemically important banks. In addition, the risk of loans-and-advances business is positively correlated with treasury operations risk and negatively correlated with off-balance-sheet credit business. While the risk of loans-and-advances business is significant, the risks of treasury operations and off-balance-sheet credit business still play an indispensable role in (and contain vital information about) credit risk. In addition, banking as a system can achieve lower credit risk, but this effect is weakened under the extreme lower-tail risk.