Value at Risk with Peaks over Threshold: Comparison Study of Parameter Estimation

The importance of financial risk management has been highlighted after several recent incidences of global financial crisis. One of the issues in financial risk management is how to measure the risk; currently, the most widely used risk measure is the Value at Risk(VaR). We can consider to estimate VaR using extreme value theory if the financial data have heavy tails as the recent market trend. In this paper, we study estimations of VaR using Peaks over Threshold(POT), which is a common method of modeling fat-tailed data using extreme value theory. To use POT, we first estimate parameters of the Generalized Pareto Distribution(GPD). Here, we compare three different methods of estimating parameters of GPD by comparing the performance of the estimated VaR based on KOSPI 5 minute-data. In addition, we simulate data from normal inverse Gaussian distributions and examine two parameter estimation methods of GPD. We find that the recent methods of parameter estimation of GPD work better than the maximum likelihood estimation when the kurtosis of the return distribution of KOSPI is very high and the simulation experiment shows similar results.