Estimation of VaR and Expected Shortfall for Stock Returns

Various estimators of two risk measures of a specific financial portfolio, Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall, are compared for each case of 1-day and 10-day horizons. We use the Korea Composite Stock Price Index data of 20-year period including the year 2008 of the global financial crisis. Indexes of five foreign stock markets are also used for the empirical comparison study. The estimator considering both the heavy tail of loss distribution and the conditional heteroscedasticity of time series is of main concern, while other standard and new estimators are considered too. We investigate which estimator is best for the Korean stock market and which one shows the best overall performance.