The Ten Commandments for Optimizing Value-at-Risk and Daily Capital Charges

Credit risk is the most important type of risk in terms of monetary value. Another key risk measure is market risk, which is concerned with stocks and bonds, and related financial derivatives, as well as exchange rates and interest rates. This paper is concerned with market risk management and monitoring under the Basel II Accord, and presents Ten Commandments for optimizing Value-at-Risk (VaR) and daily capital charges, based on choosing wisely from: (1) conditional, stochastic and realized volatility; (2) symmetry, asymmetry and leverage; (3) dynamic correlations and dynamic covariances; (4) single index and portfolio models; (5) parametric, semiparametric and nonparametric models; (6) estimation, simulation and calibration of parameters; (7) assumptions, regularity conditions and statistical properties; (8) accuracy in calculating moments and forecasts; (9) optimizing threshold violations and economic benefits; and (10) optimizing private and public benefits of risk management. For practical purposes, it is found that the Basel II Accord would seem to encourage excessive risk taking at the expense of providing accurate measures and forecasts of risk and VaR.Daily capital charges, Excessive risk taking Market risk, Risk management, Value-at-risk, Violations.

"The Ten Commandments for Optimizing Value-at-Risk and Daily Capital Charges"

Credit risk is the most important type of risk in terms of monetary value. Another key risk measure is market risk, which is concerned with stocks and bonds, and related financial derivatives, as well as exchange rates and interest rates. This paper is concerned with market risk management and monitoring under the Basel II Accord, and presents Ten Commandments for optimizing Value-at-Risk (VaR) and daily capital charges, based on choosing wisely from: (1) conditional, stochastic and realized volatility; (2) symmetry, asymmetry and leverage; (3) dynamic correlations and dynamic covariances; (4) single index and portfolio models; (5) parametric, semiparametric and nonparametric models; (6) estimation, simulation and calibration of parameters; (7) assumptions, regularity conditions and statistical properties; (8) accuracy in calculating moments and forecasts; (9) optimizing threshold violations and economic benefits; and (10) optimizing private and public benefits of risk management. For practical purposes, it is found that the Basel II Accord would seem to encourage excessive risk taking at the expense of providing accurate measures and forecasts of risk and VaR.

The Ten Commandments for Optimizing Value-at-Risk and Daily Capital Charges

Credit risk is the most important type of risk in terms of monetary value. Another key risk measure is market risk, which is concerned with stocks and bonds, and related financial derivatives, as well as exchange rates and interest rates. This paper is concerned with market risk management and monitoring under the Basel II Accord, and presents Ten Commandments for optimizing Value-at-Risk (VaR) and daily capital charges, based on choosing wisely from: (1) conditional, stochastic and realized volatility; (2) symmetry, asymmetry and leverage; (3) dynamic correlations and dynamic covariances; (4) single index and portfolio models; (5) parametric, semiparametric and nonparametric models; (6) estimation, simulation and calibration of parameters; (7) assumptions, regularity conditions and statistical properties; (8) accuracy in calculating moments and forecasts; (9) optimizing threshold violations and economic benefits; and (10) optimizing private and public benefits of risk management. For practical purposes, it is found that the Basel II Accord would seem to encourage excessive risk taking at the expense of providing accurate measures and forecasts of risk and VaR.

Analysing seasonal changes in New Zealand's largest inbound market

The purpose of the paper is to analyse seasonal changes in tourism demand by New Zealand's major tourist source market, Australia, for the period 1979-2005. A time series regression model is used to test the significance of monthly seasonality. By examining sub-periods that are based on major exogenous events which have had significant impacts on international travel demand to New Zealand, seasonal distributions and intra-year seasonal variations over the 27-year period are subsequently estimated using normalized seasonal indices, coefficient of variation, seasonal ratio and the Gini coefficient. Compared with the findings of previous studies for other countries, the empirical evidence suggests that, while the tourism flow distribution or concentration is not significant for New Zealand, the seasonality in tourism demand by New Zealand's largest inbound market has changed over time

Testing Multiple Non-nested Factor Demand Systems,

Empirical factor demand analysis typically involves making a choice from among several competing non-nested functional forms. Each of the commonly used factor demand systems, such as Translog, Generalized Leontief, Quadratic, and Generalized McFadden, can provide a valid and useful empirical description of the underlying production structure of the firm. As there is no theoretical guidance on selecting the model which is best able to capture the relevant features of the data, formal testing procedures can provide additional information. Paired and joint univariate nonnested tests of a null model against both single and multiple alternatives have been discussed at length in the literature, whereas virtually no attention has been paid to either paired or joint multivariate non-nested tests. This paper shows how some multivariate non-nested tests can be derived from their univariate counterparts, and examines how to use these tests empirically to compare alternative factor demand systems. The empirical application involves the classical Berndt- Khaled annual data set for the U.S. manufacturing sector over the period 1947-1971. A statistically adequate empirical specification is determined for each competing factor demand system. The empirical results are interpreted for each system, and the models are compared on the basis of multivariate paired and joint non-nested procedures.

"Dynamic Conditional Correlations for Asymmetric Processes"

The paper develops two Dynamic Conditional Correlation (DCC) models, namely the Wishart DCC (WDCC) model and the Matrix-Exponential Conditional Correlation (MECC) model. The paper applies the WDCC approach to the exponential GARCH (EGARCH) and GJR models to propose asymmetric DCC models. We use the standardized multivariate t-distribution to accommodate heavy-tailed errors. The paper presents an empirical example using the trivariate data of the Nikkei 225, Hang Seng and Straits Times Indices for estimating and forecasting the WDCC-EGARCH and WDCC-GJR models, and compares the performance with the asymmetric BEKK model. The empirical results show that AIC and BIC favour the WDCC-EGARCH model to the WDCC-GJR and asymmetric BEKK models. Moreover, the empirical results indicate that the WDCC-EGARCH-t model produces reasonable VaR threshold forecasts, which are very close to the nominal 1% to 3% values.

A Scientific Classification of Volatility Models.

Modeling volatility, or “predictable changes” over time and space in a variable, is crucial in the natural and social sciences. Life can be volatile, and anything that matters, and which changes over time and space, involves volatility. Without volatility, many temporal and spatial variables would simply be constants. Our purpose is to propose a scientific classification of the alternative volatility models and approaches that are available in the literature, following the Linnaean taxonomy. This scientific classification is used because the literature has evolved as a living organism, with the birth of numerous new species of models.

Necessary and Sufficient Moment Conditions for the GARCH(r,s) and Asymmetric Power GARCH(r,s) Models,

Although econometricians have been using Bollerslev's (1986) GARCH (r, s) model for over a decade, the higher-order moment structure of the model remains unresolved. The sufficient condition for the existence of the higherorder moments of the GARCH (r, s) model was given by Ling (1999a). This paper shows that Ling's condition is also necessary. As an extension, the necessary and sufficient moment conditions are established for Ding, Granger and Engle's (1993) asymmetric power GARCH (r, s) model.

Asymptotic Theory for a Vector ARMA-GARCH Model,

This paper investigates the asymptotic theory for a vector ARMA-GARCH model. The conditions for the strict stationarity, ergodicity, and the higherorder moments of the model are established. Consistency of the quasi- maximum likelihood estimator (QMLE) is proved under only the second-order moment condition. This consistency result is new, even for the univariate ARCH and GARCH models. Moreover, the asymptotic normality of the QMLE for the vector ARCH model is obtained under only the second-order moment of the unconditional errors, and the finite fourth-order moment of the conditional errors. Under additional moment conditions, the asymptotic normality of the QMLE is also obtained for the vector ARMA-ARCH and ARMA-GARCH models, as well as a consistent estimator of the asymptotic covariance.

Modelling the Determinants of International Tourism Demand to Australia,

Prior to the recent Asian currency and economic crises, tourism from Asia had rapidly become Australia's major tourism export industry. Tourists from Singapore, which is Australia's fifth major market, represented 6% of international tourist arrivals to Australia in 1996. The average annual growth rate of tourist arrivals from Singapore of around 20% over 1990-96 far exceeded the 10.5% average annual percentage growth rate of all tourist arrivals to Australia over the same period (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1997). Despite the Asian currency and economic crises in 1997-98, tourist arrivals to Australia from Singapore has continued to grow slowly. It is imperative from the tourism marketing SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis to consider the economic factors influencing international tourism demand for Australia by Singapore, and to undertake a primary competitor analysis of New Zealand. The purpose of the paper is to estimate the income, price and transportation cost elasticities of inbound tourism from Singapore to Australia using seasonally unadjusted quarterly data, to determine if Australia and New Zealand are substitute or complementary destinations for Singaporean tourists, and to examine issues such as nonstationarity, cointegration and spurious regressions.