Until recently, the lack of appropriate harmonized micro data covering both income and wealth has been the major obstacle in analyzing financial vulnerability of the household sector in the euro area. This data problem has been partially circumvented by the dissemination of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). Based on this unique data set, we put forward a stress testing method of household balance sheets in a consistent manner across euro area countries. To this end, we put forward a metric of distress which takes into account both the solvency and liquidity position of the household and demonstrate that this metric outperforms the most common metrics used in the literature, which do not take into account the households' asset holdings. We calibrate this metric using the country level data on non-performing loan ratios and estimate stress-test elasticities in response to an interest rate shock, an income shock and a house price shock. We find that, albeit euro-area households are relatively resilient as a whole, there are large discrepancies in the impact of macroeconomic shocks across countries. Finally, we demonstrate that our framework could be used to assess some measures mitigating losses to the banks, such as engaging in the restructurings of loans that are at risk of defaulting.
In this paper, we use the DCC MIDAS approach to assess the validity of the wake-up call hypothesis for developed and emerging markets during the global financial crisis (GFC). We use this approach to decompose the total correlations into short- (daily) and long-run (quarterly) correlations for the period from 1999 to 2011. We then examine the transmission mechanisms by regressing the quarterly economic, financial, and behavioral variables on the quarterly DCC–MIDAS correlations. We find that country specific factors are crisis contingent transmission mechanisms for the co-movements of emerging country pairs and mixed pairs of advanced and emerging countries during the global financial crisis. However, we do not observe wake-up calls in the transmission of the crisis among advanced country pairs. The classification of the transmission mechanisms for crisis and non-crisis periods with the different country pairs has important implications for crisis management as well as for portfolio investment strategies. Thus, our findings contribute to the discussion on the role and effectiveness of the international financial architecture.