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Stress-testing of retail and corporate segments of Russian credit market
The objective of the paper is to investigate and compare risk patterns in retail and corporate segments and assess the potential impact of macroeconomic shocks on loan quality. Banks’ monthly financial statements data for the period 2004–2012 are used. Firstly, we develop an indicator to measure institution’s credit risk that reflects variance and average value of NPL corrected for loan loss reserves. It is used to compare the risk-return patterns of largest state - owned banks, and under our framework we identify how the strategies of various banks differ in retail and corporate loans, identifying ‘safest’ and ‘riskiest’ institutions. Secondly, loan growth and credit risk sensitivity to macroeconomic shocks is analyzed using vector auto regression. Macroeconomic shocks do not significantly increase NPL growth in corporate segment. However, inflation and investment growth have considerable impact on NPL growth in retail segment (which is however almost three times less than the corporate). Based on these findings we conclude that there is no reason to expect rampant rise in corporate loan defaults in response to exceptional sudden changes in macroeconomic environment in Russia, though further growth of corporate loan segment increases credit risk, while the opposite is true about the retail sector.