Forecasting Value at Risk: Evidence from Emerging Economies in Asia

Abstract

In this paper, various Value-at-Risk techniques are applied to stock indices of 9 Asian emerging financial markets. The results from our selected models are then backtested by Unconditional Coverage, Independence, Joint Tests of Unconditional Coverage and Independence and Basel tests to ensure the quality of Value-at-Risk (VaR) estimates. The main conclusions are: (1) Timevarying volatility is the most important characteristic of stock returns when modelling VaR; (2) Financial data is not normally distributed, indicating that the normality assumption of VaR is not relevant; (3) Among VAR forecasting approaches, the backtesting based on in- and out-of-sample evaluations confirms its superiority in the class of GARCH models; Historical Simulation (HS), Filtered Historical Simulation (FHS), RiskMetrics and Monte Carlo were rejected because of its underestimation (for HS and RiskMetrics) or overestimation (for the FHS and Monte Carlo); (4) Models under student’s t and skew student’s t distribution are better in taking into account financial data’s characters; and (5) Forecasting VaR for futures index is harder than for stock index. Moreover, results show that there is no evidence to recommend the use of GARCH (1,1) to estimate VaR for all markets. In practice, the HS and RiskMetrics are popularly used by banks for large portfolios, despite of its serious underestimations of actual losses. These findings would be helpful for financial managers, investors and regulators dealing with stock markets in Asian emerging economies.