Volume 5, Issue 1

The paper deals with Conditional Value at Risk (CoVaR) for copulas with nontrivial tail dependence. We show that both in the standard and the modified settings, the tail dependence function determines the limiting properties of CoVaR as the conditioning event becomes more extreme. The results are illustrated with examples using the extreme value, conic and truncation invariant families of bivariate tail-dependent copulas.

This paper is devoted to the introduction and study of a new family of multivariate elicitable risk measures. We call the obtained vector-valued measures multivariate expectiles. We present the different approaches used to construct our measures. We discuss the coherence properties of these multivariate expectiles. Furthermore, we propose a stochastic approximation tool of these risk measures.

Based on a general construction method by means of bivariate ultramodular copulas we construct, for particular settings, special bivariate conic, extreme value, and Archimax copulas. We also show that the sets of copulas obtained in this way are dense in the sets of all conic, extreme value, and Archimax copulas, respectively.

We derive improved estimates for the model risk of risk portfolios when additional to the marginals some partial dependence information is available.We consider models which are split into k subgroups and consider various classes of dependence information either within the subgroups or between the subgroups. As consequence we obtain improved VaR bounds for the joint portfolio compared to the case with only information on the marginals. Our paper adds to various recent approaches to obtain reliable and usable risk bounds resp. estimates of the model risk by including partial dependence information additional to the information on the marginals. In particular we extend an approach suggested in Bignozzi, Puccetti and Rüschendorf (2015) and in Puccetti, Rüschendorf, Small and Vanduffel (2017), which is based on positive dependence resp. on independence information available for some subgroups.

Several successful approaches to structure determination of hierarchical Archimedean copulas (HACs) proposed in the literature rely on agglomerative clustering and Kendall’s correlation coefficient. However, there has not been presented any theoretical proof justifying such approaches. This work fills this gap and introduces a theorem showing that, given the matrix of the pairwise Kendall correlation coefficients corresponding to a HAC, its structure can be recovered by an agglomerative clustering technique.

In the last decade, simplified vine copula models have been an active area of research. They build a high dimensional probability density from the product of marginals densities and bivariate copula densities. Besides parametric models, several approaches to nonparametric estimation of vine copulas have been proposed. In this article, we extend these approaches and compare them in an extensive simulation study and a real data application. We identify several factors driving the relative performance of the estimators. The most important one is the strength of dependence. No method was found to be uniformly better than all others. Overall, the kernel estimators performed best, but do worse than penalized B-spline estimators when there is weak dependence and no tail dependence.

In this note, we elucidate some of the mathematical, statistical and epistemological issues involved in using copulas to model discrete data. We contrast the possible use of (nonparametric) copula methods versus the problematic use of parametric copula models. For the latter, we stress, among other issues, the possibility of obtaining impossible models, arising from model misspecification or unidentifiability of the copula parameter.

The paper deals with the family of irreducible left truncation invariant bivariate copulas, which admit a nontrivial lower tail dependence function. Such copulas, similarly as the Archimedean ones, are characterized by a functional parameter, a generator being an increasing convex function.We provide a nonparametric, piece-wise linear estimator of such generators.

We discuss the so-called “simplifying assumption” of conditional copulas in a general framework. We introduce several tests of the latter assumption for non- and semiparametric copula models. Some related test procedures based on conditioning subsets instead of point-wise events are proposed. The limiting distributions of such test statistics under the null are approximated by several bootstrap schemes, most of them being new. We prove the validity of a particular semiparametric bootstrap scheme. Some simulations illustrate the relevance of our results.

This paper studies the increasing convex ordering of the optimal discounted capital allocations for stochastic arrangement increasing risks with stochastic arrangement decreasing occurrence times. The application to optimal allocation of policy limits is presented as an illustration as well.

The aim of the present paper is to develop and examine association coefficients which can be helpfully applied in the framework of regression analysis. The construction of the coeffiecients is connected with the well-known Spearman coeffiecient and extensions of it (see Liebscher [5]). The proposed coeffiecient measures the discrepancy between the data points and a function which is strictly increasing on one interval and strictly decreasing in the remaining domain.We prove statements about the asymptotic behaviour of the estimated coeffiecient (convergence rate, asymptotic normality).

We derive the exact distributions of order statistics from a finite number of, in general, dependent random variables following a joint l n,p -symmetric distribution. To this end,we first review the special cases of order statistics fromspherical aswell as from p-generalized Gaussian sample distributions from the literature. To study the case of general l n,p -dependence, we use both single-out and cone decompositions of the events in the sample space that correspond to the cumulative distribution function of the kth order statistic if they are measured by the l n,p -symmetric probability measure.We show that in each case distributions of the order statistics from l n,p -symmetric sample distribution can be represented as mixtures of skewed l n−ν,p -symmetric distributions, ν ∈ {1, . . . , n − 1}.

We present a constructive and self-contained approach to data driven infinite partition-of-unity copulas that were recently introduced in the literature. In particular, we consider negative binomial and Poisson copulas and present a solution to the problem of fitting such copulas to highly asymmetric data in arbitrary dimensions.

We discuss some of the features of the R add-on package GJRM which implements a flexible joint modeling framework for fitting a number of multivariate response regression models under various sampling schemes. In particular,we focus on the case inwhich the user wishes to fit bivariate binary regression models in the presence of several forms of selection bias. The framework allows for Gaussian and non-Gaussian dependencies through the use of copulae, and for the association and mean parameters to depend on flexible functions of covariates. We describe some of the methodological details underpinning the bivariate binary models implemented in the package and illustrate them by fitting interpretable models of different complexity on three data-sets.

This paper presents a new copula to model dependencies between insurance entities, by considering how insurance entities are affected by both macro and micro factors. The model used to build the copula assumes that the insurance losses of two companies or lines of business are related through a random common loss factor which is then multiplied by an individual random company factor to get the total loss amounts. The new two-component copula is not Archimedean and it extends the toolkit of copulas for the insurance industry.

We introduce a compound multivariate distribution designed for modeling insurance losses arising from different risk sources in insurance companies. The distribution is based on a discrete-time Markov Chain and generalizes the multivariate compound negative binomial distribution, which is widely used for modeling insurance losses.We derive fundamental properties of the distribution and discuss computational aspects facilitating calculations of risk measures of the aggregate loss, as well as allocations of the aggregate loss to individual types of risk sources. Explicit formulas for the joint moment generating function and the joint moments of different loss types are derived, and recursive formulas for calculating the joint distributions given. Several special cases of particular interest are analyzed. An illustrative numerical example is provided.

Herd behavior is an important economic phenomenon, especially in the context of the recent financial crises. Prior studies propose several measures to quantify herd behavior. In this paper, we show that these measures reflect different perspectives on this behavior, and hence, their interpretation requires great care. Taking a critical attitude toward existing herd behavior measures, we study their properties and pitfalls in detail.

In this paper, we propose a simple non-parametric goodness-of-fit test for elliptical copulas of any dimension. It is based on the equality of Kendall’s tau and Blomqvist’s beta for all bivariate margins. Nominal level and power of the proposed test are investigated in a Monte Carlo study. An empirical application illustrates our goodness-of-fit test at work.

Metamodeling techniques have recently been proposed to address the computational issues related to the valuation of large portfolios of variable annuity contracts. However, it is extremely diffcult, if not impossible, for researchers to obtain real datasets frominsurance companies in order to test their metamodeling techniques on such real datasets and publish the results in academic journals. To facilitate the development and dissemination of research related to the effcient valuation of large variable annuity portfolios, this paper creates a large synthetic portfolio of variable annuity contracts based on the properties of real portfolios of variable annuities and implements a simple Monte Carlo simulation engine for valuing the synthetic portfolio. In addition, this paper presents fair market values and Greeks for the synthetic portfolio of variable annuity contracts that are important quantities for managing the financial risks associated with variable annuities. The resulting datasets can be used by researchers to test and compare the performance of various metamodeling techniques.

We present a class of flexible and tractable static factor models for the term structure of joint default probabilities, the factor copula models. These high-dimensional models remain parsimonious with paircopula constructions, and nest many standard models as special cases. The loss distribution of a portfolio of contingent claims can be exactly and efficiently computed when individual losses are discretely supported on a finite grid. Numerical examples study the key features affecting the loss distribution and multi-name credit derivatives prices. An empirical exercise illustrates the flexibility of our approach by fitting credit index tranche prices.