Forecasting VaRs via hybrid EVT with normal and non-normal filters: A comparative analysis from the Chinese stock market

This paper studies the performance of hybrid methods combining normal and non-normal GARCH-type filters with extreme value theory (EVT) in predicting Value-at-Risk (VaR) for four major stock indices in the Chinese stock market. Based on the out-of-sample VaR forecasts results over the 24 models considered, we find that the hybrid EVT approaches illustrate substantial advantage over the corresponding GARCH-type models with parametric distributions, especially in the lower tail and extremal VaR evaluations (1% and 0.5% VaRs). Overall, the hybrid EVT methods with heavy-tailed filters (std-EVT, sstd-EVT) perform the best, followed by the hybrid EVT approaches with light-tailed filters (norm-EVT, snorm-EVT), and then the GARCH-type models with skewed student-t distribution. The conditional normal, skewed normal and student-t models are rejected and excluded from the Model Confidence Set (MCS) in predicting extremal VaRs for most cases, particularly for the lower tail. Additionally, we find that the results for alternative models in predicting VaRs vary sharply among alternative innovation specifications, but present trivial differences across the volatility models. Furthermore, our results based on the MCS tests and comparative backtests also indicate that the scoring function effectively discriminates predictive performance across methods for the lower tail, in contrast to showing less disparity for the upper tail. This emphasizes the importance of model selection in VaR forecasting performance for the lower tail. The above findings are robust to alternative threshold selections and the rolling-step chosen to update parameters. Similar analyses concerning the out-of-sample performance of the 24 models in predicting the Expected Shortfall (ES) show consistent results overall.