Correlations, dimension, and risk measure

Yesterday, while I was attending the IFM2 conference, at HEC Montreal, I heard a nice talk about credit risk, and a comparison between contagion (or at least default correlation), for corporate and retail companies (in the US). And it was mentioned that default correlation was much lower for retail companies than it could be for corporate risk. In a discussion that followed those slides, it was mentioned that banks in the US should actually have been working more with those small firms, since contagion risk was much lower.

A problem here is that the link between correlation, risk and dimension is rather complicated:

  • corporate means a small number of firms, high correlation (and possible large individual losses)
  • retail means a large number of firms (even perhaps extremely large), lower correlation (and small individual losses)

A simple model for default models is based on the assumption that we deal with an exchangeable portfolio (as in a previous post). With the following code, given an (individual) default probability, a default correlation, and a number of firms, it is possible to calculate the probability to have more than a given number of defaults.

 proba=function(s,a,m,n){
 b=a/m-a
 choose(n,s)*integrate(function(t){t^s*(1-t)^(n-s)*
 dbeta(t,a,b)},lower=0,upper=1,subdivisions=1000,
 stop.on.error =  FALSE)$value}

CDF=function(x=10,r=.4,m=.1,n=50){
a=m*(1-r)/r ;
V=rep(NA,n+1)
 for(i in 0:n){
 V[i+1]=proba(i,a,m,n)}
 V=V/sum(V);
 return(sum(V[1:(x+1)])) }

It is possible to calculate, for a large range of correlations, the probability to have – at least – 20% of default in the portfolio (in order to compare things that are comparable).

R=seq(.01,.99,by=.01)
VQ=matrix(NA,length(A),2)
for(i in 1:length(A)){
VQ[i,1]=1-CDF(r=A[i],x=4,n=20);  
VQ[i,2]=1-CDF(r=A[i],x=200,n=1000)}

With 20 firms (corporate) we want to have at least 4 defaults, while with 1000 firms (retail) there should be 200 defaults. As mentioned in the previous post, the relationship between correlation and quantiles of sums is not simple. Hence, it might not be monotone. The dotted line is the probability to have at least 4 defaults when default correlation is 50% (around 10%). The plain line is the probability to have at least 200 defaults, as a function of the correlation,

plot(A,1-VQ[,2],type="l",col="red",ylim=c(0,.22))
abline(h=1-VQ[50,1],lty=2,col="red")

In that case, with only a correlation of 10% among retail firms, the probability of having 20% defaults is the same as the same probability for corporate, but with 50% correlation… One should remember that in portfolio analysis, the links between correlation, dimension and risk measure is a sensitive issue…

Talk on bivariate count times series in finance and risk management

I will be giving a talk on May 4th, at the Mathematical Finance Days, at HEC Montréal, on multivariate dynamic models for counts. The conference is organized by IFM2 (Institut de Finance Mathématique de Montréal). I will be chairing some session and I will give a talk based on the joint paper with Mathieu Boudreault.

The slides can be downloaded from the blog,

In various situations in the insurance industry, in finance, in epidemiology, etc., one needs to represent the joint evolution of the number of occurrences of an event. In this paper, we present a multivariate integer‐valued autoregressive (MINAR) model, derive its properties and apply the model to earthquake occurrences across various pairs of tectonic plates. The model is an extension of Pedelis & Karlis (2011) where cross autocorrelation (spatial contagion in a seismic context) is considered. We fit various bivariate count models and find that for many contiguous tectonic plates, spatial contagion is significant in both directions. Furthermore, ignoring cross autocorrelation can underestimate the potential for high numbers of occurrences over the short‐term. An application to risk management and cat‐bond pricing will be discussed.

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