Technical paper/Value-at-risk (VAR)
Credit spread shocks: how big and how often?
The second half of 2007 saw violent moves in credit spreads. In the fallout, there has been much discussion about how to estimate the probabilities of these severe events, but few conclusions have been obtained beyond the fact that historical data is…
Error of VAR by overlapping intervals
When overlapping intervals in time series are used, volatility and price changes' percentiles are underestimated. Consequently, value-at-risk is also underestimated. Heng Sun, Izzy Nelken, Guowen Han and Jiping Guo measure the size of this underestimation
Component VAR for a non-normal world
It has become standard to account for non-normality when estimating portfolio value-at-risk, but there are few methods available to calculate the risk contributions of each component in a non-normal portfolio. Brian Peterson and Kris Boudt present a…
Component VAR for a non-normal world
Market Risk
Looking forward to back testing
With increasing challenges to measure value-at-risk and meet high regulatory requirements, the focus has turned to back testing as a way of assuring models' adequacy. Carsten S Wehn proposes a new regime of back testing, combining state-of-the-art…
Risk contributions from generic user-defined factors
In this article, Attilio Meucci draws on regression analysis to decompose volatility, value-at-risk and expected shortfall into arbitrary combinations or aggregations of risk factors, and presents a simple recipe to implement this approach in practice