Term structure of risk under alternative econometric specifications

This paper characterizes the term structure of risk measures such as value at risk (VaR) and expected shortfall under different econometric approaches including multivariate regime switching, GARCH-in-mean models with Student-t errors, two-component GARCH models and a nonparametric bootstrap. We show how to derive the risk measures for each of these models and document large variations in term structures across econometric specifications. An out-of-sample forecasting experiment applied to stock, bond and cash portfolios suggests that the best model is asset- and horizon specific but that the bootstrap and regime switching model are best overall for VaR levels of 5% and 1%, respectively.