Shadow insurance is a regulatory loophole exploited by certain insurance groups to increase risk exposure, potentially destabilising the financial system. In this paper, we evaluate the contribution of shadow insurance to systemic risk of the global financial sector using a sample of 215 international insurance entities covering the 2004–2017 period. We detect shadow insurance by examining every reinsurance agreement on the Schedule S filings. Using both ΔCoVaR and SRISK measures, we find that the practice of shadow insurance is a significant driver of global systemic risk.

We study how the characteristics of different financial institutions relate to systemic risk using the ΔCoVaR measure of Adrian and Brunnermeier (2016). We contrast traditional banks with shadow entities, such as Money Market Funds and Finance Services, using a sample of 476 European financial institutions between 2006 and 2015. We find that systemic risk increases significantly in the size of large financial institutions, particularly Money Market Funds, while it is insensitive to the size of Finance Services. We also find that Finance Services are particularly sensitive to proxies for market risk. For traditional banks, their reliance on short term wholesale funding is a key determinant of their contribution to systemic risk.

We empirically evaluate how accounting and financial variables affect the level of systemic risk in traditional and shadow banks, and in real estate finance services in China over the period 2006–2019. We also conduct some stability analysis by evaluating the impact of crisis sub-periods. We find that systemic risk increases in the Size of large financial institutions, particularly shadow entities, while it is insensitive to the Size of real estate finance services. Real estate finance services are instead particularly sensitive to Maturity Mismatch and Leverage. Finally, systemic risk differs across state and non state owned banks.