Volume 2, Issue 1

Without any doubt, credit risk is one of the most important risk types in the classical banking industry. Consequently, banks are required by supervisory audits to allocate economic capital to cover unexpected future credit losses. Typically, the amount of economical capital is determined with a credit portfolio model, e.g. using the popular CreditRisk + framework (1997) or one of its recent generalizations (e.g. [8] or [15]). Relying on specific distributional assumptions, the credit loss distribution of the CreditRisk + class can be determined analytically and in real time. With respect to the current regulatory requirements (see, e.g. [4, p. 9-16] or [2]), banks are also required to quantify how sensitive their models (and the resulting risk figures) are if fundamental assumptions are modified. Against this background, we focus on the impact of different dependence structures (between the counterparties of the bank’s portfolio) within a (generalized) CreditRisk + framework which can be represented in terms of copulas. Concretely, we present some results on the unknown (implicit) copula of generalized CreditRisk + models and quantify the effect of the choice of the copula (between economic sectors) on the risk figures for a hypothetical loan portfolio and a variety of parametric copulas.

There is an infinite exchangeable sequence of random variables {X k } k∈ℕ such that each finitedimensional distribution follows a min-stable multivariate exponential law with Galambos survival copula, named after [7]. A recent result of [15] implies the existence of a unique Bernstein function Ψ associated with {X k } k∈ℕ via the relation Ψ(d) = exponential rate of the minimum of d members of {X k } k∈ℕ . The present note provides the Lévy–Khinchin representation for this Bernstein function and explores some of its properties.

In this paper, we provide a tutorial on multivariate extreme value methods which allows to estimate the risk associated with rare events occurring jointly. We draw particular attention to issues related to extremal dependence and we insist on the asymptotic independence feature. We apply the multivariate extreme value theory on two data sets related to hydrology and meteorology: first, the joint flooding of two rivers, which puts at risk the facilities lying downstream the confluence; then the joint occurrence of high speed wind and low air temperatures, which might affect overhead lines.

The aim of the present paper is to examine two wide classes of dependence coefficients including several well-known coefficients, for example Spearman’s ρ, Spearman’s footrule, and the Gini coefficient. There is a close relationship between the two classes: The second class is obtained by a symmetrisation of the coefficients in the former class. The coefficients of the first class describe the deviation from monotonically increasing dependence. The construction of the coefficients can be explained by geometric arguments. We introduce estimators of the dependence coefficients and prove their asymptotic normality.

We solve a recent open problem about a new transformation mapping the set of copulas into itself. The obtained mapping is characterized in algebraic terms and some limit results are proved.

Exchangeable copulas are used to model an extra-binomial variation in Bernoulli experiments with a variable number of trials. Maximum likelihood inference procedures for the intra-cluster correlation are constructed for several copula families. The selection of a particular model is carried out using the Akaike information criterion (AIC). Profile likelihood confidence intervals for the intra-cluster correlation are constructed and their performance are assessed in a simulation experiment. The sensitivity of the inference to the specification of the copula family is also investigated through simulations. Numerical examples are presented.