We present a general framework for testing the accuracy of Value-at-Risk (VaR) forecasts. The approach is based on the observation that violations – the days on which portfolio losses exceed the VaR – should be unpredictable. Specifically, these violations form a martingale difference...

Financial risk management typically deals with low probability events in the tails of asset price distributions. In order to capture the behavior of these tails, one should therefore rely on models that explicitly focus on the tails. Extreme value theory (EVT) based models do exactly that, and...