Value at Risk When Daily Changes in Market Variables are not Normally Distributed

Abstract

This paper proposes a new model for calculating VaR where the user is free to choose any probability distributions for daily changes in the market variables and parameters of the probability distributions are subject to updating schemes such as GARCH. Transformations of the probability distributions are assumed to be multivariate normal. The model is appealing in that the calculation of VaR is relatively straightforward and can make use of the RiskMetrics or a similar database. We test a version of the model using nine years of daily data on 12 different exchange rates. When the first half of the data is used to estimate the model's parameters we find that it provides a good prediction of the distribution of daily changes in the second half of the data. * Faculty of Management, University of Toronto, 105 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3E6. We are grateful to Tom McCurdy for comments and helpful suggestions. An earlier version of this paper was entitled "Taking account of the kurtosis in market variables when calculating value at risk" 2

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