Fitting insurance claims to skewed distributions: Are the skew-normal and skew-student good models?

Abstract

This paper analyzes whether the skew-normal and skew-student distributions recently discussed in the finance literature are reasonable models for describing claims in property-liability insurance. We consider two well-known datasets from actuarial science and fit a number of parametric distributions to these data. Also the non-parametric transformation kernel approach is considered as a benchmark model. We find that the skew-normal and skew-student are reasonably competitive compared to other models in the literature when describing insurance data. In addition to goodness-of-fit tests, tail risk measures such as value at risk and tail value at risk are estimated for the datasets under consideration.