In this paper we introduce a novel approach to risk estimation based on nonlinear factor models - the "StressVaR" (SVaR). Developed to evaluate the risk of hedge funds, the SVaR appears to be applicable to a wide range of investments. Its principle is to use the fairly short and sparse history...

Hedge fund returns have scarce observations, and from the data one can successfully estimate the joint laws of the return with each of risk driving factors but cannot estimate higher-dimensional joint laws. We propose a methodology to recover from this information the conditional mean of the...

We consider the problem of measuring the risk of a portfolio with scarce observations by linking it to several risk factors. A typical example is measuring the risk of a hedge fund. It is assumed that from the available data one can estimate the joint law of all the factors as well as all the...

Traditional, fixed-income risk models are based on the assumption that bond risk is directly proportional to the interest rate, i.e. that the interest-rate distribution is "log-normal." Two corollaries would then follow. Firstly, nominal interest rates could never be negative. Furthermore, bond...

The LP formula is based upon the substitution of the exogenous risk aversion hypothesis by a credit equilibrium hypothesis. This leads to a trade-off between expected blue-sky return – the expected return excluding default scenarios – and extreme risk estimated from scenarios leading to...

The Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) has been the cornerstone of the asset allocation for over 40 years. In the past decade though, it led in a rather systematic way to bad investments decisions. One of MPT's main assumptions, investor risk aversion that translates into volatility aversion, biases...

This article investigates the European repo market and its role as an amplification channel for sovereign-debt crises. We focus on the centrally cleared segment, representing the majority of European repos. A novel data set on repo and margin haircuts applied to sovereign bonds by central...

We present in this note a method for computing the regulatory capital of financial institutions, along with the Basel Committee requirements, which avoids the pitfalls of the Value-at-Risk and, in particular, the fact that – as observed during 2008 crisis – it aggravates systemic risk rather...

The impact of increasing leverage in the economy produces hyperreaction of market participants to variations of their revenues. If the income of banks decreases, they mass-reduce their lendings; if corporations sales drop, and due to existing debt they cannot adjust their liquidities by further...