A Simple and Robust Approach for Expected Shortfall Estimation

To appear on Journal of Computational Finance.

23 Pages Posted: 18 Mar 2019 Last revised: 6 Dec 2020

See all articles by Zhibin Pan

Zhibin Pan

East China Normal University (ECNU)

Tao Pang

North Carolina State University

Yang Zhao

North Carolina State University

Multiple version iconThere are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: January 2, 2018

Abstract

In risk management, estimating Expected Shortfall (ES), though important and indispensable, is difficult when a sample size is small. This paper makes efforts to create a recipe for such challenge. A tail-based normal approximation with explicit formulas is derived by matching a specific quantile and mean excess square of the sample observations. To enhance the estimation accuracy, we then propose an adjusted tail-based normal approximation based on the sample's tail weight. The adjusted tailed-based normal approximation is robust and efficient in the sense that it can be applied to various heavy-tailed distributions, such as student's t, lognormal, Gamma, Weibull, etc., and the errors are very small. In addition, compared to two common ES estimators --- mean of excessive losses and extreme value theory estimator, the proposed approach achieves more accurate estimates with significantly smaller errors, especially at high confidence levels. Another appealing feature of the approach is that it works very well with small sample size. Effects of linear transformations on the ES estimator are also investigated to guarantee the practicality and further validate this new approach.

Keywords: Expected Shortfall; Tail-based Normal Approximation; Conditional Skewness; Tail-Weight Adjustment; Heavy-Tailed Distribution; Small Sample

JEL Classification: C51; C63; G32

Suggested Citation

Pan, Zhibin and Pang, Tao and Zhao, Yang, A Simple and Robust Approach for Expected Shortfall Estimation (January 2, 2018). To appear on Journal of Computational Finance., Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3341748 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3341748

Zhibin Pan

East China Normal University (ECNU) ( email )

North Zhongshan Road Campus
3663 N. Zhongshan Rd.
Shanghai, 200062
China

Tao Pang (Contact Author)

North Carolina State University ( email )

Hillsborough Street
Raleigh, NC 27695
United States

Yang Zhao

North Carolina State University ( email )

Hillsborough Street
Raleigh, NC 27695
United States

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