In certain cases the distribution of the normalized maximumof a sample can be better approximated by a sequence ofdifferent extreme value distributions than by the final one. Weshow that these cases are rather restricted and that the possibleimprovement is not spectacular.

Denote the loss return on the equity of a financial institution as X and that of the entire market as Y . For a given very small value of p 0, the marginal expected shortfall (MES) is defined as E(X | Y QY (1−p)), where QY (1−p) is the (1−p)-th quantile of the distribution of Y . The MES...

Consider n i.i.d. random vectors on R2, with unknown, common distribution function F. Under a sharpening of the extreme value condition on F, we derive a weighted approximation of the corresponding tail copula process. Then we construct a test to check whether the extreme value condition holds...

There is no scientific consensus on the fundamental question whether the probability distribution of the human life span has a finite endpoint or not and, if so, whether this upper limit changes over time. Our study uses a unique dataset of the ages at death - in days - of all (about 285,000)...

The selection of upper order statistics in tail estimation is notoriously difficult. Most methods are based on asymptotic arguments, like minimizing the asymptotic mse, that do not perform well in finite samples. Here we advance a data driven method that minimizes the maximum distance between...