Risk management research divides into measurement and mechanism. The measurement literature — VaR and expected shortfall estimation, extreme value theory, drawdown analysis — asks how to quantify what can go wrong in a portfolio. The mechanism literature — systemic risk, contagion networks, stress testing — asks how losses propagate between institutions and markets.
The practical test for measurement papers is backtesting honesty: a VaR model is only as good as its violation rate and the independence of its violations, and papers that report Kupiec or Christoffersen tests on out-of-sample data outrank those that stop at in-sample fit. For tail-risk work specifically, be wary of estimators tuned to one crisis; the ranking below rewards papers validated across multiple stress regimes. This is also where regulation (Basel’s shift from VaR to expected shortfall) keeps the academic work unusually connected to practice.
Related hubs: Volatility Modeling, Portfolio Optimization, Fixed Income & Rates.
Explainers from the corpus: risk measures beyond VaR →
In the financial system, bailout strategies play a pivotal role in mitigating substantial losses resulting from systemic risk. However, the lack of a closed-form objective function to the optimal bailout problem poses significant challenges in its resolution. This paper conceptualizes the optimal ba
This paper studies an $α$-robust utility maximization problem where an investor faces an intractable claim – an exogenous contingent claim with known marginal distribution but unspecified dependence structure with financial market returns. The $α$-robust criterion interpolates between worst-case ($
This paper revisits and extends the 2013 development by Rockafellar and Uryasev of the Risk Quadrangle (RQ) as a unified scheme for integrating risk management, optimization, and statistical estimation. The RQ features four stochastics-oriented functionals – risk, deviation, regret, and error, alon
We develop an averaging approach to robust risk measurement under payoff uncertainty. Instead of taking a worst-case value over an uncertainty neighborhood, we weight nearby payoffs more heavily under a chosen metric and average the baseline risk measure. We prove continuity in the neighborhood radi
We study submodularity for law-invariant functionals, with particular attention to convex risk measures. Expected losses are modular, and certainty equivalents are submodular exactly when the loss function is convex. Law-invariant coherent risk measures are submodular exactly when they are coherent
Standard rare-event simulation techniques require exact distributional specifications, which limits their effectiveness in the presence of distributional uncertainty. To address this, we develop a novel framework for estimating rare-event probabilities subject to such distributional model risk. Spec
This paper studies Pareto-optimal reinsurance design in a monopolistic market with multiple primary insurers and a single reinsurer, all with heterogeneous risk preferences. The risk preferences are characterized by a family of risk measures, called Range Value-at-Risk (RVaR), which includes both Va
This study explores contagion in the Chinese stock market using Hawkes processes to analyze autocorrelation and cross-correlation in multivariate time series data. We examine whether market indices exhibit trending behavior and whether sector indices influence one another. By fitting self-exciting a
We develop a robust linear-quadratic mean-field control framework for systemic risk under model uncertainty, in which a central bank jointly optimizes interest rate policy and supervisory monitoring intensity against adversarial distortions. Our model features multiple policy instruments with intera
Despite decades of research in risk management, most of the literature has focused on scalar risk measures (like e.g. Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall). While such scalar measures provide compact and tractable summaries, they provide a poor informative value as they miss the intrinsic multivaria
We establish sharp upper and lower bounds for distortion risk metrics under distributional uncertainty. The uncertainty sets are characterized by four key features of the underlying distribution: mean, variance, unimodality, and Wasserstein distance to a reference distribution. We first examine very
We propose and analyze a framework for discrete-time robust mean-field control problems under common noise uncertainty. In this framework, the mean-field interaction describes the collective behavior of infinitely many cooperative agents’ state and action, while the common noise – a random disturba
In this paper, by proposing two new kinds of distributional uncertainty sets, we explore robustness of distortion risk measures against distributional uncertainty. To be precise, we first consider a distributional uncertainty set which is characterized solely by a ball determined by general Wasserst
Extreme volatility, nonlinear dependencies, and systemic fragility are characteristics of cryptocurrency markets. The assumptions of normality and centralized control in traditional financial risk models frequently cause them to miss these changes. Four components-volatility stress testing, stableco
We study S-shaped utility maximisation with VaR constraint and unobservable drift coefficient. Using the Bayesian filter, the concavification principle, and the change of measure, we give a semi-closed integral representation for the dual value function and find a critical wealth level that determin
We study the problem of resource provisioning under stringent reliability or service level requirements, which arise in applications such as power distribution, emergency response, cloud server provisioning, and regulatory risk management. With chance-constrained optimization serving as a natural st
We study distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems with uncertainty sets consisting of high-dimensional random vectors that are close in the multivariate Wasserstein distance to a reference random vector. We give conditions when the images of these sets under scalar-valued aggregation func
Cross-validation is a statistical tool that can be used to improve large covariance matrix estimation. Although its efficiency is observed in practical applications and a convergence result towards the error of the non linear shrinkage is available in the high-dimensional regime, formal proofs that
As the increasing application of AI in finance, this paper will leverage AI algorithms to examine tail risk and develop a model to alter tail risk to promote the stability of US financial markets, and enhance the resilience of the US economy. Specifically, the paper constructs a multivariate multile
In the field of finance, the prediction of individual credit default is of vital importance. However, existing methods face problems such as insufficient interpretability and transparency as well as limited performance when dealing with high-dimensional and nonlinear data. To address these issues, t
📬 The Quant Space Weekly
One email a week: the most interesting quant finance papers, scored and summarized. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.