Abstract

The banking supervision sets out the need to conduct stress tests for the financial institutions in New Zealand. For the purpose of stress tests, the paper develops a methodology to calculate a series of severe but plausible economic scenarios. Five widely-used statistical distributions are investigated in fitting the return series of NZ 50. We show that the Skewed t distribution has the best goodness of fit and generates the most suitable stress test scenarios. Our approach could be an important component of sound risk management for the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. The financial institutions are expected to continue to develop their stress testing frameworks, and to use the results in our paper to inform their capital management and risk appetite setting processes.