EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The pernicious effects of contaminated data in risk management

Laurent Frésard, Christophe Perignon () and Anders Wilhelmsson

Journal of Banking & Finance, 2011, vol. 35, issue 10, 2569-2583

Abstract: Banks hold capital to guard against unexpected surges in losses and long freezes in financial markets. The minimum level of capital is set by banking regulators as a function of the banks' own estimates of their risk exposures. As a result, a great challenge for both banks and regulators is to validate internal risk models. We show that a large fraction of US and international banks uses contaminated data when testing their models. In particular, most banks validate their market risk model using profit-and-loss (P/L) data that include fees and commissions and intraday trading revenues. This practice is inconsistent with the definition of the employed market risk measure. Using both bank data and simulations, we find that data contamination has dramatic implications for model validation and can lead to the acceptance of misspecified risk models. Moreover, our estimates suggest that the use of contaminated data can significantly reduce (market-risk induced) regulatory capital.

Keywords: Regulatory; capital; Proprietary; trading; Backtesting; Value-at-risk; Profit-and-loss (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378426611000847
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: The Pernicious Effects of Contaminated Data in Risk Management (2011)
Working Paper: The pernicious effects of contaminated data in risk management (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbfina:v:35:y:2011:i:10:p:2569-2583

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Banking & Finance is currently edited by Ike Mathur

More articles in Journal of Banking & Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:jbfina:v:35:y:2011:i:10:p:2569-2583