Where is the system?

The aim of this paper is to determine the optimal size of the system (global, supranational or national) when measuring the systemic importance of a bank. Since 2011, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) has tagged global systemically important banks (G-SIBs) and has imposed a higher regulatory capital of loss absorbency (HLA) requirement. However, the identification of G-SIBs may overlook banks with major domestic systemic importance, i.e. the domestic systemically important banks (D-SIBs). This paper describes how to adjust market-based systemic risk measures to identify D-SIBs. In an empirical analysis within the eurozone, I show that (i) the SRISK methodology produces similar rankings whatever the system used. However, (ii) the SRISK values greatly vary across systems, which calls for imposing the higher of either D-SIB or G-SIB HLA requirements. Finally, (iii) the ΔΔCoVaR methodology is extremely sensitive to the choice of the system.