Reduced-bias estimation of extreme risk measures for heavy-tailed distributions
Résumé
Conditional tail expectation (CTE) is a coherent risk measure defined as the mean of the loss distribution above a high quantile.The existence of the CTE as well as the asymptotic properties of associated estimators however require integrability conditions that may be violated when dealing with heavy-tailed distributions. We introduce Box-Cox transforms of the CTE that have two benefits. First, they alleviate these theoretical issues. Second, they enable the recovery of a number of risk measures such as conditional tail moments. The construction of dedicated estimators is based on the investigation of the asymptotic relationship between Box-Cox transforms of the CTE and quantiles at extreme probability levels, as well as on an extrapolation formula established in the heavy-tailed context. We quantify and estimate the bias induced by the use of these approximations and then introduce reduced-bias estimators whose asymptotic properties are rigorously shown. Their finite-sample properties are assessed on a simulation study and illustrated on real data, highlighting the practical interest of both the bias reduction and the Box-Cox transform.