English

On the Basel Liquidity Formula for Elliptical Distributions

Risk Management 2018-03-22 v1

Abstract

A justification of the Basel liquidity formula for risk capital in the trading book is given under the assumption that market risk-factor changes form a Gaussian white noise process over 10-day time steps and changes to P&L are linear in the risk-factor changes. A generalization of the formula is derived under the more general assumption that risk-factor changes are multivariate elliptical. It is shown that the Basel formula tends to be conservative when the elliptical distributions are from the heavier-tailed generalized hyperbolic family. As a by-product of the analysis a Fourier approach to calculating expected shortfall for general symmetric loss distributions is developed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1803.07590,
  title  = {On the Basel Liquidity Formula for Elliptical Distributions},
  author = {Janine Balter and Alexander J. McNeil},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.07590},
  year   = {2018}
}