Tail dependence for elliptically contoured distributions

The relationship between the theory of elliptically contoured distributions and the concept of tail dependence is investigated. We show that bivariate elliptical distributions possess the so-called tail dependence property if the tail of their generating random variable is regularly varying, and we give a necessary condition for tail dependence which is somewhat weaker than regular variation of the latter tail. In addition, we discuss the tail dependence property for some well-known examples of elliptical distributions, such as the multivariate normal, t, logistic, and Bessel distributions. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002