Volume 39, Issue 3-4

To increase the power of the VaR tests, it has been recently proposed to extend the duration-based test class with the geometric-VaR and Gini-coefficient-based tests. These tests, though exhibiting outstanding power properties, have not gained recognition in the industry. A potential reason is the absence of ready-to-use statistical distributions. To remedy this, we inquire into the limiting properties of these tests and derive relevant asymptotic distributions. We also provide a generalized geometric-VaR test and give its distribution. Through the Monte Carlo study, we show the accuracy of our asymptotic procedures in finite samples, and we find these procedures to be relevant for the current Basel standards. Our theoretical results are illustrated by the empirical study that includes data from the current COVID-19 crisis.

Phase-type distributions are dense in the class of distributions on the positive real line, and their flexibility and closed-form formulas in terms of matrix calculus allow fitting models to data in various application areas. However, the parameters are in general non-identifiable, and hence the dimension of two similar models may be very different. This paper proposes a new method for selecting the dimension of phase-type distributions via penalisation of the likelihood function. The penalties are in terms of the Green matrix, from which it is possible to extract the contributions of each state to the overall mean. Since representations with higher dimensions are penalised, a parsimony effect is obtained. We perform a numerical study with randomly generated phase-type samples to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed procedure, and also apply the technique to the absolute log-returns of EURO STOXX 50 and Bitcoin prices.