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An Evaluation of Bank VaR Measures for Market Risk During and Before the Financial Crisis

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We study the performance and behavior of Value at Risk (VaR) measures used by a number of large banks during and before the financial crisis. Alternative benchmark VaR measures, including GARCH-based measures, are also estimated directly from the banks' trading revenues and help to explain the bank VaR performance results. While highly conservative in the pre-crisis period, bank VaR exceedances were excessive and clustered in the crisis period. All benchmark VaRs were more accurate in the pre-crisis period with GARCH VaR measures the most accurate in the crisis period having lower exceedance rates with no exceedance clustering. Variance decompositions indicate a limited ability of the banks' VaR methodologies to adjust to the crisis-period market conditions. Despite their weaker performance, the bank VaRs exhibited greater predictive power for a measure of realized PnL volatility than benchmark VaR measures. Benchmark Expected Shortfall measures are also considered.

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  • James M. O'Brien & Pawel J. Szerszen, 2014. "An Evaluation of Bank VaR Measures for Market Risk During and Before the Financial Crisis," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2014-21, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedgfe:2014-21
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    2. Danielsson, Jon & Zhou, Chen, 2015. "Why risk is so hard to measure," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 62002, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    3. Stepankova, Barbora & Teply, Petr, 2023. "Consistency of banks' internal probability of default estimates: Empirical evidence from the COVID-19 crisis," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 154(C).

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    Keywords

    Market risk; value at risk; backtesting; profit and loss; financial crisis;
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