Additivity properties for Value-at-Risk under Archimedean dependence and heavy-tailedness

Abstract

Mainly due to new capital adequacy standards for banking and insurance, an increased interest exists in the aggregation properties of risk measures like Value-at-Risk (VaR). We show how VaR can change from sub to superadditivity depending on the properties of the underlying model. Mainly, the switch from a finite to an infinite mean model gives a completely different asymptotic behaviour. Our main result proves a conjecture made in Barbe et al. [Barbe, P., Fougères, A.L., Genest, C., 2006. On the tail behavior of sums of dependent risks. ASTIN Bull. 36(2), 361–374].