Financial risk managers routinely use non-linear time series models to predict the downside risk of the capital under management. They also need to evaluate the adequacy of their model using so-called backtesting procedures. The latter involve hypothesis testing and evaluation of loss functions....

This paper demonstrates that existing quantile regression models used for forecasting Value-at-Risk (VaR) and expected shortfall (ES) are sensitive to initial conditions. A Bayesian quantile regression approach is proposed for estimating joint VaR and ES models. By treating the initial values as...

This paper focuses on the selection and comparison of alternative non-nested volatility models. We review the traditional in-sample methods commonly applied in the volatility framework, namely diagnostic checking procedures, information criteria, and conditions for the existence of moments and...

Data insufficiency and reporting threshold are two main issues in operational risk modelling. When these conditions are present, maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) may produce very poor parameter estimates. In this study, we first investigate four methods to estimate the parameters of truncated...

Accurate prediction of risk measures such as Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES) requires precise estimation of the tail of the predictive distribution. Two novel concepts are introduced that offer a specific focus on this part of the predictive density: the censored posterior, a...

This paper proposes a Bayesian regression model with time-varying coefficients (TVC) that makes it possible to estimate jointly the degree of instability and the time-path of regression coefficients. Thanks to its computational tractability, the model proves suitable to perform the first (to our...

We formulate a bivariate stochastic volatility jump-diffusion model with correlated jumps and volatilities. An MCMC Metropolis-Hastings sampling algorithm is proposed to estimate the model's parameters and latent state variables (jumps and stochastic volatilities) given observed returns. The...

Time series of financial asset values exhibit well known statistical features such as heavy tails and volatility clustering. Strongly present in some series, nonstationarity is a feature that has been somewhat overlooked. This may however be a highly relevant feature when estimating extreme...

For the popular mean-variance portfolio choice problem in the case without a risk-free asset, we develop a new portfolio strategy to mitigate estimation risk. We show that in both calibrations and real datasets, optimally combining the sample global minimum variance portfolio with a sample...

This paper considers an institutional investor who is implementing a long-term portfolio allocation strategy using forecasts of financial returns. We compare the performance of two competing macro-finance models, an unrestricted Vector AutoRegression (VAR) and a fully structural Dynamic...