We characterize second order regular variation of the tail sum of F together with a balance condition on the tails interms of the behaviour of the characteristic function near zero.

Asymptotic tail probabilities for bivariate linear combinations of subexponential random variables are given. These results are applied to explain the joint movements of the stocks of reinsurers. Portfolio investment and retrocession practices in the reinsurance industry, for reasons of...

It has been known for a long time that for bootstrapping the probability distribution of the maximum of a sample consistently, the bootstrap sample size needs to be of smaller order than the original sample size. See Jun Shao and Dongsheng Tu (1995), Ex. 3.9,p. 123. We show that the same is true...

We give a sufficient condition for i.i.d. random variables X1,X2 in order to have P{X1-X2>x} ~ P{|X1|>x} as x tends to infinity. A factorization property for subexponential distributions is used in the proof. In a subsequent paper the results will be applied to model fragility of financial markets.

For testing whether a distribution function is heavy tailed, we study the Kolmogorov test, Berk-Jones test, score test and their integrated versions. A comparison is conducted via Bahadur efficiency and simulations. The score test and the integrated score test show the best performance. Although...

Tail index estimation depends for its accuracy on a precise choice of the sample fraction, i.e. the number of extreme order statistics on which the estimation is based. A complete solution to the sample fraction selection is given by means of a two step subsample bootstrap method. This method...

Estimators of the extreme-value index are based on a set of upper order statistics. We present an adaptive method to choose the number of order statistics involved in an optimal way, balancing variance and bias components. Recently this has been achieved for the similar but somewhat less...

The stability of the financial system at higher loss levels is either characterized by asymptotic dependence or asymptotic independence. If asymptotically independent, the dependency, when present, eventually dies out completely at the more extreme quantiles, as in case of the multivariate...

The theory of stable probability distributions and their domains of attraction is derived in a direct way(avoiding the usual route via infinitely divisible distributions) using Fourier transforms. Regularly varyingfunctions play an important role in the exposition.