Developing a stress testing framework based on market risk models

The Basel 2 Accord requires regulatory capital to cover stress tests, yet no coherent and objective framework for stress testing portfolios exists. We propose a new methodology for stress testing in the context of market risk models that can incorporate both volatility clustering and heavy tails. Empirical results compare the performance of eight risk models with four possible conditional and unconditional return distributions over different rolling estimation periods. When applied to major currency pairs using daily data spanning more than 20 years we find that stress test results should have little impact on current levels of foreign exchange regulatory capital. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.