Chapter XX Measuring Systemic Risk – Structural Approaches

The financial crisis of 2007/08 has demonstrated that factors for financial distress of large parts of the economy depend to a large extent on the interrelations between the financial institutions. Risks threatening the financial sector can be decomposed into risks based in the individual factors for single institutions and risks which can be attributed to the financial system as a whole. This part of the risks is called systemic risk. We review several approaches for quantifying systemic risk, most of them based on structural credit modeling. In particular we present an approach which is inspired by the fact that the joint probability distributions can be represented by their individual marginals and the copula function, which represents the interrelations.