The impact of complex financial instruments on banks’ vulnerability: empirical evidence on SSM banks

Level 2 (L2) and Level 3 (L3) assets and liabilities represent a substantial portion of European banks’ balance sheets, and valuing them is extremely difficult, since no liquid market prices are available. This paper relies on a large panel of euro-area banks between 2014 and 2019, and two different econometric frameworks, in order to estimate the relationship between the holdings of selected instruments (L2, L3 and Non-Performing Loans, NPLs) and banks’ key performance and risk profile metrics, namely Credit Default Swaps (CDSs), Price-to-Book (PtB) ratios and Z-scores. It finds that larger holdings of L2 tend to be associated with higher CDSs, at least in the short run, while larger amounts of NPLs and L3 tend to characterize banks with higher CDSs, lower PtB ratios and worse Z-scores, other things being equal.