The current subprime crisis has prompted us to look again into the nature of risk at the tail of the distribution. In particular, we investigate the risk contribution of an asset, which has infrequent but huge losses, to a portfolio using two risk measures, namely Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES). While ES is found to measure the tail risk contribution effectively, VaR is consistent with intuition only if the underlying return distribution is well behaved. To facilitate the use of ES, we present a power function formula that can calculate accurately the critical values of the ES test statistic. This in turn enables us to derive a size-based multiplication factor for risk capital requirement.
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Paper provided by Cardiff University, Cardiff Business School, Economics Section in its series Cardiff Economics Working Papers with number
E2008/14.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Christoffersen, Peter F, 1998.
"Evaluating Interval Forecasts,"
International Economic Review,
Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 39(4), pages 841-62, November.