Understanding the Economic Determinants of the Severity of Operational Losses: A Regularized Generalized Pareto Regression Approach

Abstract

We investigate a novel database of 10,217 extreme operational losses from the Italian bank UniCredit, covering a period of 10 years and 7 different event types. Our goal is to shed light on the dependence between the severity distribution of these losses and a set of macroeconomic, financial and firm-specific factors. To do so, we use Generalized Pareto regression techniques, where both the scale and shape parameters are assumed to be functions of these explanatory variables. In this complex distributional regression framework, we perform the selection of the relevant covariates with a state-of-the-art penalized-likelihood estimation procedure relying on L₁-penalty terms. A simulation study indicates that this approach efficiently selects covariates of interest and tackles spurious regression issues encountered when dealing with integrated time series. The results of our empirical analysis have important implications in terms of risk management and regulatory policy. In particular, we found that high Italian unemployment rate and low GDP growth rate in the European Union are associated with smaller probabilities of extreme severities, whereas high values of the VIX and high growth rates of housing prices are associated with more extreme losses. Looking at firm-specific factors, low leverage ratio and high deposit growth rate are associated with a higher likelihood of extreme losses. Lastly, we illustrate the impact of different economic scenarios on the requested capital for operational risk. We find important discrepancies across event types and scenarios.

Keywords: Operational loss; Generalized Pareto distribution; Penalized-likelihood; LASSO; Variable selection

JEL Classification: C18, C52, G21