Sector concentration in loan portfolios and economic capital

The purpose of this paper is to measure the potential impact of business-sector concentration on economic capital for loan portfolios and to explore a tractable model for its measurement. The empirical part evaluates the increase in economic capital in a multi-factor asset value model for portfolios with increasing sector concentration. The sector composition is based on credit information from the German central credit register. Finding that business sector concentration can substantially increase economic capital, the theoretical part of the paper explores whether this risk can be measured by a tractable model that avoids Monte Carlo simulations. We analyze a simplified version of the analytic value-at-risk approximation developed by Pykhtin (2004), which only requires risk parameters on a sector level. Sensitivity analyses with various input parameters show that the analytic approximation formulae perform well in approximating economic capital for portfolios which are homogeneous on a sector level in terms of PD and exposure size. Furthermore, we explore the robustness of our results for portfolios which are heterogeneous in terms of these two characteristics. We find that low granularity ceteris paribus causes the analytic approximation formulae to underestimate economic capital, whereas heterogeneity in individual PDs causes overestimation. Indicative results imply that in typical credit portfolios, PD heterogeneity will at least compensate for the granularity effect. This suggests that the analytic approximations estimate economic capital reasonably well and/or err on the conservative side.