European Sectors and Conditional Measures of Extreme Market and Credit Risk

The objective of this paper is to determine how relative market and credit risk changes among European sectors during times of extreme market fluctuations. Ten sectors comprising the S&P Euro index are compared prior to and during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Market risk is measured using Value at Risk (VaR) and Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) which measures risk beyond VaR. Credit risk is measured using the Merton I KMV Distance to Default (DO) model, and our unique Conditional Distance to Default (COD) model, which measures extreme credit risk. Differences are found between conditional and non-conditional outcomes, and sectors which were most risky prior to the GFC are found to be different to the riskiest sectors during the GFC. The insights into extreme sectoral risk provided by the study are important to investors in portfolio selection, and to banks in setting sectoral concentration limits.