The value of tail risk hedging in defined contribution plans: what does history tell us

2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 240-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANUP K. BASU ◽  
MICHAEL E. DREW

AbstractHedging against tail events in equity markets has been forcefully advocated in the aftermath of recent global financial crisis. Whether this is beneficial to long horizon investors like employees enrolled in defined contribution (DC) plans, however, has been subject to criticism. We conduct historical simulation since 1928 to examine the effectiveness of active and passive tail risk hedging using out of money put options for hypothetical equity portfolios of DC plan participants with 20 years to retirement. Our findings show that the cost of tail hedging exceeds the benefits for a majority of the plan participants during the sample period. However, for a significant number of simulations, hedging result in superior outcomes relative to an unhedged position. Active tail hedging is more effective when employees confront several panic-driven periods characterized by short and sharp market swings in the equity markets over the investment horizon. Passive hedging, on the other hand, proves beneficial when they encounter an extremely rare event like the Great Depression as equity markets go into deep and prolonged decline.

2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (Supplement) ◽  
pp. 36-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albrecht Ritschl

AbstractThe Great Recession of 2008 hit the international economy harder than any other peacetime recession since the Great Contraction after 1929. Soon enough, analogies with the Great Depression were presented, and conclusions were drawn regarding the political response to the slump. This paper is an attempt to sort out real and false analogies and to present conclusions for policy. Its main hypothesis is that the Great Recession resembles the final phase of the Great Contraction between 1931 and 1933, characterized by a fast spreading global financial crisis and the breakdown of the international Gold Standard. The same is also true of the political responses to the banking problems occurring in both crises. The analogy seems less robust for the initial phase of the Great Depression after 1929. The monetary policy response to the Great Recession largely seems to be informed by the monetary interpretation of the Great Depression, but less so by the lessons from the interwar financial crises. As in the Great Depression, policy appears to be on a learning curve, moving away from a mostly monetary response toward mitigating counterpart risk and minimizing interbank contagion.


2019 ◽  
pp. 94-112
Author(s):  
Edward Fieldhouse ◽  
Jane Green ◽  
Geoffrey Evans ◽  
Jonathan Mellon ◽  
Christopher Prosser ◽  
...  

The Global Financial Crisis, which began in 2007–8, was the most significant financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and acted as a large shock to British politics. The economic vote is usually thought about as a short-term mechanism: a reward or punishment for the incumbent depending on recent economic conditions. In this chapter we examine how this shock played a role in the outcome of the 2015 General Election, seven years after the crisis began. The Global Financial Crisis continued to affect voting behaviour in 2015 for two reasons: first, it did long-lasting damage to perceptions of Labour’s economic competence, and second, it created a political opportunity for the Conservatives to blame the previous Labour government for the aftermath of the financial crisis.


2013 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 75-81
Author(s):  
Ivica Terzić ◽  
Marko Milojević

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate performance of value-at-risk (VaR) produced by two risk models: historical simulation and Risk Metrics. We perform three backtest: unconditional coverage, independence and conditional coverage. We present results on both VaR 1% and VaR 5% on a one-day horizon for the following indices: S&P 500, DAX, SAX, PX and Belex 15. Our results show that Historical simulation 500 days rolling window approach satisfies unconditional coverage for all tested indices, while Risk Metrics has many rejection cases. On the other hand Risk Metrics model satisfies independence backtest for three indices, while Historical simulation has rejected more times. Based on our strong criteria to accept accuracy of VaR models only if both unconditional coverage and independence properties are satisfied, results indicate that during the crisis period all tested VaR models underestimate the true level of market risk exposure.


2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (06) ◽  
pp. 1250065 ◽  
Author(s):  
LADISLAV KRISTOUFEK

We investigate whether the fractal markets hypothesis and its focus on liquidity and investment horizons give reasonable predictions about the dynamics of the financial markets during turbulences such as the Global Financial Crisis of late 2000s. Compared to the mainstream efficient markets hypothesis, the fractal markets hypothesis considers the financial markets as complex systems consisting of many heterogenous agents, which are distinguishable mainly with respect to their investment horizon. In the paper, several novel measures of trading activity at different investment horizons are introduced through the scaling of variance of the underlying processes. On the three most liquid US indices — DJI, NASDAQ and S&P500 — we show that the predictions of the fractal markets hypothesis actually fit the observed behavior adequately.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Chang ◽  
Jeremie Holdom ◽  
Vineer Bhansali

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