This paper explains specifics of stress testing at the IMF. After a brief section on the evolution of stress tests at the IMF, the paper presents the key steps of an IMF staff stress test. They are followed by a discussion on how IMF staff uses stress tests results for policy advice. The paper concludes by identifying remaining challenges to make stress tests more useful for the monitoring of financial stability and an overview of IMF staff work program in that direction. Stress tests help assess the resilience of financial systems in IMF member countries and underpin policy advice to preserve or restore financial stability. This assessment and advice are mainly provided through the Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP). IMF staff also provide technical assistance in stress testing to many its member countries. An IMF macroprudential stress test is a methodology to assess financial vulnerabilities that can trigger systemic risk and the need of systemwide mitigating measures. The definition of systemic risk as used by the IMF is relevant to understanding the role of its stress tests as tools for financial surveillance and the IMF’s current work program. IMF stress tests primarily apply to depository intermediaries, and, systemically important banks.

Credibility is the bedrock of any crisis stress test. The use of stress tests to manage systemic risk was introduced by the U.S. authorities in 2009 in the form of the Supervisory Capital Assessment Program. Since then, supervisory authorities in other jurisdictions have also conducted similar exercises. In some of those cases, the design and implementation of certainelements of the framework have been criticized for their lack of credibility. This paper proposes a set of guidelines for constructing an effective crisis stress test. It combines financial markets impact studies of previous exercises with relevant case study information gleaned from those experiences to identify the key elements and to formulate their appropriate design. Pertinent concepts, issues and nuances particular to crisis stress testing are also discussed. The findings may be useful for country authorities seeking to include stress tests in their crisis management arsenal, as well as for the design of crisis programs.

Stress testing has become the risk management tool du jour in the wake of the global financial crisis. In countries where the information reported by financial institutions is considered to be of sufficiently good quality, and supervisory and regulatory standards are high, stress tests can be of significant value. In contrast, the proliferation of stress testing in underdeveloped financial systems with weak oversight regimes is fraught with uncertainties, as it is unclear what the results actually represent and how they could be usefully applied. In this paper, problems associated with stress tests using weak data are examined. We offer a potentially more useful alternative, the "breaking point" method, which also requires close coordination with on-site supervision and complemented by other supervisory tools and qualitative information. Excel spreadsheet templates of the stress tests presented in this paper are provided.

Over the last decade, stress testing has become a central aspect of the Fund’s bilateral and multilateral surveillance work. Recently, more emphasis has also been placed on the role of insurance for financial stability analysis. This paper reviews the current state of system-wide solvency stress tests for insurance based on a comparative review of national practices and the experiences from Fund’s FSAP program with the aim of providing practical guidelines for the coherent and consistent implementation of such exercises. The paper also offers recommendations on improving the current insurance stress testing approaches and presentation of results.

Rules of thumb can be useful in undertaking quick, robust, and readily interpretable bank stress tests. Such rules of thumb are proposed for the behavior of banks’ capital ratios and key drivers thereof—primarily credit losses, income, credit growth, and risk weights—in advanced and emerging economies, under more or less severe stress conditions. The proposed rules imply disproportionate responses to large shocks, and can be used to quantify the cyclical behaviour of capital ratios under various regulatory approaches.

This paper presents a "second-generation" solvency stress testing framework extending applied stress testing work centered on Cihák (2007). The framework seeks enriching stress tests in terms of risk-sensitivity, while keeping them flexible, transparent, and user-friendly. The main contributions include (a) increasing the risk-sensitivity of stress testing by capturing changes in risk-weighted assets (RWAs) under stress, including for non-internal ratings based (IRB) banks (through a quasi-IRB approach); (b) providing stress testers with a comprehensive platform to use satellite models, and to define various assumptions and scenarios; (c) allowing stress testers to run multi-year scenarios (up to five years) for hundreds of banks, depending on the availability of data. The framework uses balance sheet data and is Excel-based with detailed guidance and documentation.

The IMF has had extensive involvement in the stress testing of financial systems in its member countries. This book presents the methods and models that have been developed by IMF staff over the years and that can be applied to the gamut of financial systems. An added resource for readers is the companion CD-Rom, which makes available the toolkit with some of the models presented in the book (also located at elibrary.imf.org/page/stress-test-toolkit).