SummaryDenote the loss return on the equity of a financial institution as X and that of the entire market as Y. For a given very small value of p > 0, the marginal expected shortfall (MES) is defined as E{X|Y>QY(1−p)}, where Q Y(1 − p) is the (1 − p)th quantile of the distribution of Y. The MES is an important factor when measuring the systemic risk of financial institutions. For a wide non-parametric class of bivariate distributions, we construct an estimator of the MES and establish the asymptotic normality of the estimator when p ↓ 0, as the sample size n → ∞. Since we are in particular interested in the case p = O(1/n), we use extreme value techniques for deriving the estimator and its asymptotic behaviour. The finite sample performance of the estimator and the relevance of the limit theorem are shown in a detailed simulation study. We also apply our method to estimate the MES of three large US investment banks.