Large banks assess their regulatory capital for market risk using complex, firm-wide Value-at-Risk (VaR) models. In their 'bottom-up' approach to VaR there are many sources of model risk. A recent amendment to banking regulations requires additional market risk capital to cover all these model...

[Update: Within four weeks of the original publication of this research report, Risk Magazine reported in its 28th February 2012 issue story titled 'Goodbye VaR? Basel to Consider Other Risk Metrics': "A review of trading book capital rules, due to be launched in March by the Basel Committee on...

In Albers & Albers (Spring, 2013) we demonstrated that the historic development of U.S. real GNP, 1869-present, may be structured in recurring 14-year periods. A steady-state rate of growth of 3.4969% is thereby calculated, generating an increase in real GNP proportional to the famous “Golden...

In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, some risk management practitioners have advocated wider adoption of Bayesian inference to replace Value- at-Risk (VaR) models in order to minimize risk failures. Despite its limitations, the Bayesian methodology has significant advantages. Just...

In aftermath of the Financial Crisis, some risk management practitioners advocate wider adoption of Bayesian inference to replace Value-at-Risk (VaR) models for minimizing risk failures (Borison & Hamm, 2010). They claim reliance of Bayesian inference on subjective judgment, the key limitation...

We propose a new backtesting framework for Expected Shortfall that could be used by the regulator. Instead of looking at the estimated capital reserve and the realised cash-flow separately, one could bind them into the secured position, for which risk measurement is much easier. Using this...

Low-frequency financial returns can be modelled as centered around piecewise-constant trend functions which change at certain points in time. We propose a new stochastic time series framework which captures this feature. The main ingredient of our model is a hierarchically-ordered oscillatory...

The recent financial crisis has raised numerous questions about the accuracy of value-at-risk (VaR) as a tool to quantify extreme losses. In this paper we present empirical evidence from assessing the out-of-sample performance and robustness of VaR before and during the recent financial crisis...