Risk Budgeting

NEIL D. PEARSON, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research includes work on the development, estimation, and evaluation of models for pricing and hedging various derivatives and other financial instruments. Dr. Pearson has published papers in a number of academic journals, and is an Associate Editor of both the Journal of Financial Economics and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. He has consulted for a number of U.S. and international banks, working on term structure models, the evaluation of derivatives pricing models, and issues that arise in the computation of Value-at-Risk measures. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

• PART ONE: INTRODUCTION. What are Value-at-Risk and Risk Budgeting? Value-at-Risk of a Simple Equity Portfolio. PART TWO: TECHNIQUES OF VALUE-AT-RISK AND STRESS TESTING. The Delta-Normal Method. Historical Simulation. The Delta-Normal Method for a Fixed Income Portfolio. Monte Carlo Simulation. Using Factor Models to Compute the VaR of Equity Portfolios. Using Principal Components to Compute the VaR of Fixed-Income Portfolios. Stress Testing. PART THREE: RISK DECOMPOSITION AND RISK BUDGETING. Decomposing Risk. A "Long-Short" Hedge Fund Manager. Aggregating and Decomposing the Risks of Large Portfolios. Risk Budgeting and the Choice of Active Managers. PART FOUR: REFINEMENTS OF THE BASIC METHODS. Delta-Gamma Approaches. Variants of the Monte Carlo Approach. Extreme Value Theory and VaR. PAART FIVE: LIMITATIONS OF VALUE-AT-RISK. VaR Is Only an Estimate. Gaming the VaR. Coherent Risk Measures. PART SIX: CONCLUSION. A Few Issues in Risk Budgeting. References. Index.