Estimating the tails of loss severity via conditional risk measures for the family of symmetric generalised hyperbolic distributions

Katja Ignatieva, Zinoviy Landsman

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

This paper addresses one of the main challenges faced by insurance companies and risk management departments, namely, how to develop standardised framework for measuring risks of underlying portfolios and in particular, how to most reliably estimate loss severity distribution from historical data. This paper investigates tail conditional expectation (TCE) and tail variance premium (TVP) risk measures for the family of symmetric generalised hyperbolic (SGH) distributions. In contrast to a widely used Value-at-Risk (VaR) measure, TCE satisfies the requirement of the "coherent" risk measure taking into account the expected loss in the tail of the distribution while TVP incorporates variability in the tail, providing the most conservative estimator of risk. We examine various distributions from the class of SGH distributions, which turn out to fit well financial data returns and allow for explicit formulas for TCE and TVP risk measures. In parallel, we obtain asymptotic behaviour for TCE and TVP risk measures for large quantile levels. Furthermore, we extend our analysis to the multivariate framework, allowing multivariate distributions to model combinations of correlated risks, and demonstrate how TCE can be decomposed into individual components, representing contribution of individual risks to the aggregate portfolio risk.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)172-186
Number of pages15
JournalInsurance: Mathematics and Economics
Volume65
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Nov 2015

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Elsevier B.V.

Keywords

  • Tail conditional expectation
  • Tail value-at-risk
  • Tail variance premium

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Statistics and Probability
  • Economics and Econometrics
  • Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty

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