Quantitative Finance

On March 4th 2016 the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision published a consultative document where a new methodology, called the Standardized Measurement Approach (SMA), is introduced for computing Operational Risk regulatory capital for banks. In this note, the behavior of the SMA is studied under a variety of hypothetical and realistic conditions, showing that the simplicity of the new approach is very costly on other aspects: we find that the SMA does not respond appropriately to changes in the risk profile of a bank, nor is it capable of differentiating among the range of possible risk profiles across banks; that SMA capital results generally appear to be more variable across banks than the previous AMA option of fitting the loss data; that the SMA can result in banks over- or under-insuring against operational risks relative to previous AMA standards. Finally, we argue that the SMA is not only retrograde in terms of its capability to measure risk, but perhaps more importantly, it fails to create any link between management actions and capital requirement.

Complex risk is a critical factor for both intelligent systems and risk management. In this paper, we consider a special class of risk statistics, named complex risk statistics. Our result provides a new approach for addressing complex risk, especially in deep neural networks. By further developing the properties related to complex risk statistics, we are able to derive dual representation for such risk.

We consider computation of market values of bonus payments in multi-state with-profit life insurance. The bonus scheme consists of additional benefits bought according to a dividend strategy that depends on the past realization of financial risk, the current individual insurance risk, the number of additional benefits currently held, and so-called portfolio-wide means describing the shape of the insurance business. We formulate numerical procedures that efficiently combine simulation of financial risk with more analytical methods for the outstanding insurance risk. Special attention is given to the case where the number of additional benefits bought only depends on the financial risk. Methods and results are illustrated via a numerical example.

Accounting for model uncertainty in risk management and option pricing leads to infinite dimensional optimization problems which are both analytically and numerically intractable. In this article we study when this hurdle can be overcome for the so-called optimized certainty equivalent risk measure (OCE) -- including the average value-at-risk as a special case. First we focus on the case where the uncertainty is modeled by a nonlinear expectation penalizing distributions that are "far" in terms of optimal-transport distance (Wasserstein distance for instance) from a given baseline distribution. It turns out that the computation of the robust OCE reduces to a finite dimensional problem, which in some cases can even be solved explicitly. This principle also applies to the shortfall risk measure as well as for the pricing of European options. Further, we derive convex dual representations of the robust OCE for measurable claims without any assumptions on the set of distributions. Finally, we give conditions on the latter set under which the robust average value-at-risk is a tail risk measure.

Motivated by liquidity risk in mathematical finance, D. Lacker introduced concentration inequalities for risk measures, i.e. upper bounds on the \emph{liquidity risk profile} of a financial loss. We derive these inequalities in the case of time-consistent dynamic risk measures when the filtration is assumed to carry a Brownian motion. The theory of backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs) and their dual formulation plays a crucial role in our analysis. Natural by-products of concentration of risk measures are a description of the tail behavior of the financial loss and transport-type inequalities in terms of the generator of the BSDE, which in the present case can grow arbitrarily fast.

The metalog distributions represent a convenient way to approach many practical applications. Their distinctive feature is simple closed-form expressions for quantile functions. This paper contributes to further development of the metalog distributions by deriving the closed-form expressions for the Conditional Value at Risk, a risk measure that is closely related to the tail conditional expectations. It also addressed the derivation of the first-order partial moments and shows that they are convex with respect to the vector of the metalog distribution parameters.

This thesis presents the Conditional Value-at-Risk concept and combines an analysis that covers its application as a risk measure and as a vector norm. For both areas of application the theory is revised in detail and examples are given to show how to apply the concept in practice. In the first part, CVaR as a risk measure is introduced and the analysis covers the mathematical definition of CVaR and different methods to calculate it. Then, CVaR optimization is analysed in the context of portfolio selection and how to apply CVaR optimization for hedging a portfolio consisting of options. The original contributions in this part are an alternative proof of Acerbi's Integral Formula in the continuous case and an explicit programme formulation for portfolio hedging. The second part first analyses the Scaled and Non-Scaled CVaR norm as new family of norms in R n and compares this new norm family to the more widely known L p norms. Then, model (or signal) recovery problems are discussed and it is described how appropriate norms can be used to recover a signal with less observations than the dimension of the signal. The last chapter of this dissertation then shows how the Non-Scaled CVaR norm can be used in this model recovery context. The original contributions in this part are an alternative proof of the equivalence of two different characterizations of the Scaled CVaR norm, a new proposition that the Scaled CVaR norm is piecewise convex, and the entire \autoref{chapter:Recovery_using_CVaR}. Since the CVaR norm is a rather novel concept, its applications in a model recovery context have not been researched yet. Therefore, the final chapter of this thesis might lay the basis for further research in this area.

We analyze systems of agents sharing light-tailed risky claims issued by different financial objects. Assuming exponentially distributed claims, we obtain that both agents' and system's losses follow generalized exponential mixture distributions. We show that this leads to qualitatively different results on individual and system risks compared to heavy-tailed claims previously studied in the literature. By deducing conditional loss distributions we investigate the impact of stress situations on agents' and system's losses. Moreover, we present a criterion for agents to decide whether holding few objects or portfolio diversification minimizes their risks in system crisis situations.

In this paper we study the effect of network structure between agents and objects on measures for systemic risk. We model the influence of sharing large exogeneous losses to the financial or (re)insuance market by a bipartite graph. Using Pareto-tailed losses and multivariate regular variation we obtain asymptotic results for systemic conditional risk measures based on the Value-at-Risk and the Conditional Tail Expectation. These results allow us to assess the influence of an individual institution on the systemic or market risk and vice versa through a collection of conditional systemic risk measures. For large markets Poisson approximations of the relevant constants are provided in the example of an insurance market. The example of an underlying homogeneous random graph is analysed in detail, and the results are illustrated through simulations.

We develop a structural default model for interconnected financial institutions in a probabilistic framework. For all possible network structures we characterize the joint default distribution of the system using Bayesian network methodologies. Particular emphasis is given to the treatment and consequences of cyclic financial linkages. We further demonstrate how Bayesian network theory can be applied to detect contagion channels within the financial network, to measure the systemic importance of selected entities on others, and to compute conditional or unconditional probabilities of default for single or multiple institutions.