Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall approaches for option premiums and the probability of default estimation based on ARMA models

Abstract

The need to address the issue of risk management has given rise to a number of models for estimation the probability of default, as well as a special tool that allows to sell credit risk – a credit default swap (CDS). From the moment it appeared in 1994 until the crisis of 2008, that the CDS market was actively growing, and then sharply contracted. Currently, there is practically no CDS market in emerging economies (including Russia). This article is to improve the existing CDS valuation models by using discrete-time models that allow for more accurate assessment and forecasting of the selected asset dynamics, as well as new option pricing models that take into account the degree of risk acceptance by the option seller. This article is devoted to parametric discrete-time option pricing models that provide more accurate results than the traditional Black-Scholes continuous-time model. Improvement in the quality of assessment is achieved due to three factors: a more detailed consideration of the properties of the time series of the underlying asset (in particular, autocorrelation and heavy tails), the choice of the optimal number of parameters and the use of Value-at-Risk approach. As a result of the study, expressions were obtained for the premiums of European put and call options for a given level of risk under the assumption that the return on the underlying asset follows a stationary ARMA process with normal or Student's errors, as well as an expression for the credit spread under similar assumptions. The simplicity of the ARMA process underlying the model is a compromise between the complexity of model calibration and the quality of describing the dynamics of assets in the stock market. This approach allows to take into account both discreteness in asset pricing and take into account the current structure and the presence of interconnections for the time series of the asset under consideration (as opposed to the Black–Scholes model), which potentially allows better portfolio management in the stock market.