In the sixties Mandelbrot already showed that extreme price swings are more likely than some of us think or incorporate in our models. A modern toolbox for analyzing such rare events can be found in the field of extreme value theory. At the core of extreme value theory lies the modelling of...

The generalized Pareto distribution (GPD) is probably the most popular model for inference on the tail of a distribution. The peaks-over-threshold methodology postulates the GPD as the natural model for excesses over a high threshold. However, for the GPD to fit such excesses well, the threshold...