In the recent Basel Accords, the expected shortfall (ES) replaces the value-at-risk (VaR) as the standard risk measure for market risk in the banking sector, making it the most popular risk measure in financial regulation. Although ES is—in addition to many other nice properties—a coherent risk measure, it does not yet have an axiomatic foundation. In this paper, we put forward four intuitive economic axioms for portfolio risk assessment—monotonicity, law invariance, prudence, and no reward for concentration—that uniquely characterize the family of ES. Therefore, the results developed herein provide the first economic foundation for using ES as a globally dominating regulatory risk measure, currently employed in Basel III/IV. Key to the main results, several novel notions such as tail events and risk concentration naturally arise, and we explore them in detail. As a most important feature, ES rewards portfolio diversification and penalizes risk concentration in a special and intuitive way, not shared by any other risk measure. This paper was accepted by Manel Baucells, decision analysis.

The conditional tail expectation (CTE) is an important actuarial risk measure and a useful tool in financial risk assessment. Under the classical assumption that the second moment of the loss variable is finite, the asymptotic normality of the nonparametric CTE estimator has already been established in the literature. The noted result, however, is not applicable when the loss variable follows any distribution with infinite second moment, which is a frequent situation in practice. With a help of extreme‐value methodology, in this paper, we offer a solution to the problem by suggesting a new CTE estimator, which is applicable when losses have finite means but infinite variances.

Evaluating risk measures, premiums, and capital allocation based on dependent multi-losses is a notoriously difficult task. In this paper, we demonstrate how this can be successfully accomplished when losses follow the multivariate Pareto distribution of the second kind, which is an attractive model for multi-losses whose dependence and tail heaviness are influenced by a heavy-tailed background risk. A particular attention is given to the distortion and weighted risk measures and allocations, as well as their special cases such as the conditional layer expectation, tail value at risk, and the truncated tail value at risk. We derive formulas that are either of closed form or follow well-defined recursive procedures. In either case, their computational use is straightforward.

The current financial turbulence in Europe inspires and perhaps requires researchers to rethink how to measure incomes, wealth, and other parameters of interest to policy-makers and others. The noticeable increase in disparities between less and more fortunate individuals suggests that measures based upon comparing the incomes of less fortunate with the mean of the entire population may not be adequate. The classical Gini and related indices of economic inequality, however, are based exactly on such comparisons. It is because of this reason that in this paper we explore and contrast the classical Gini index with a new Zenga index, the latter being based on comparisons of the means of less and more fortunate sub-populations, irrespectively of the threshold that might be used to delineate the two sub-populations. The empirical part of the paper is based on the 2001 wave of the European Community Household Panel data set provided by EuroStat. Even though sample sizes appear to be large, we supplement the estimated Gini and Zenga indices with measures of variability in the form of normal, t-bootstrap, and bootstrap bias-corrected and accelerated confidence intervals.

Gini-type correlation coefficients have become increasingly important in a variety of research areas, including economics, insurance and finance, where modelling with heavy-tailed distributions is of pivotal importance. In such situations, naturally, the classical Pearson correlation coefficient is of little use. On the other hand, it has been observed that when light-tailed situations are of interest, and hence when both the Gini-type and Pearson correlation coefficients are well defined and finite, these coefficients are related and sometimes even coincide. In general, understanding how these correlation coefficients are related has been an illusive task. In this paper, we put forward arguments that establish such a connection via certain regression-type equations. This, in turn, allows us to introduce a Gini-type weighted insurance pricing model that works in heavy-tailed situations and thus provides a natural alternative to the classical capital asset pricing model. We illustrate our theoretical considerations using several bivariate distributions, such as elliptical and those with heavy-tailed Pareto margins.