Testing and Comparing Value-at-Risk Measures

Value-at-Risk (VaR) has emerged as the standard tool for measuring and reporting financial market risk. Currently, more than eighty commercial vendors offer enterprise or trading risk management systems which report VaR-like measures. Risk managers are therefore often left with the daunting task of having to choose from this plethora of risk models. Accordingly, this paper develops a framework for asking, first, how a risk manager can test that the VaR measure at hand is properly specified. And second, given two different VaR measures, how can the risk manager compare the two and pick the best in a statistically meaningful way? In the application, competing VaR measures are calculated from either historical or option-price based volatility measures, and the VaRs are tested and compared.
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