DISCUSSION PAPER PI-0603 After VAR: The Theory, Estimation and Insurance Applications of Quantile- Based Risk Measures

We discuss a number of quantile-based risk measures (QBRMs) that have recently been developed in the financial risk and actuarial/insurance literatures. The measures considered include the Value-at-Risk (VaR), coherent risk measures, spectral risk measures, and distortion risk measures. We discuss and compare the properties of these different measures, and point out that the VaR is seriously flawed. We then discuss how QBRMs can be estimated, and discuss some of the many ways they might be applied to insurance risk problems. These applications are typically very complex, and this complexity means that the most appropriate estimation method will often be some form of stochastic simulation.