Index-Exciting CAViaR: A New Empirical Time-Varying Risk Model

Instead of assuming the distribution of return series, Engle and Manganelli (2004) propose a new Value-at-Risk (VaR) modeling approach, Conditional Autoregressive Value-at-Risk (CAViaR), to directly compute the quantile of an individual asset’s returns which performs better in many cases than those that invert a return distribution. This paper explores more flexible CAViaR models that allow VaR prediction to depend upon a richer information set involving returns on an index. Specifically, we formulate a time-varying CAViaR model whose parameters vary according to the evolution of the index. A revisited version of this paper was published in the March 2010 issue of Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics & Econometrics.