Extreme Value Theory and Value at Risk
Abstract
Value at Risk (VaR) is a measure of the maximum potential change in value of a portfolio of financial assets with a given probability over a given time horizon. VaR became a key measure of market risk since the Basle Committee stated that banks should be able to cover losses on their trading portfolios over a ten-day horizon, 99 percent of the time. A common practice is to compute VaR by assuming that changes in value of the portfolio are normally distributed, conditional on past in-formation. However, assets returns usually come from fat-tailed distri-butions. Therefore, computing VaR under the assumption of conditional normality can be an important source of error. We illustrate this point with Chilean and U.S. returns series by resorting to extreme value theory (EVT) and GARCH-type models. In addition, we show that dynamic estimation of empirical quantiles can also give more accurate VaR estimates than quantiles of a standard normal.
Published
2010-03-01
How to Cite
Fernandez, V. (2010). Extreme Value Theory and Value at Risk. Economic Analysis Review, 18(1), 57-85. Retrieved from https://www.rae-ear.org/index.php/rae/article/view/24
Issue
Section
Articles
Upon submission of an article, authors are asked to indicate their agreement to abide by an open-access license. The license permits any user to download, print out, extract, archive, and distribute the article, so long as appropriate credit is given to the authors of the work. The license ensures that your article will be as widely available as possible and that your article can be included in any scientific archive. Please read about the Creative Commons Attribution License before submitting your paper.
Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License