Value at Risk (VaR) is a market risk measure widely used by risk managers and market regulatory authorities. There is a variety of methodologies proposed in the literature for the estimation of VaR. However, few of them get to say something about its distribution or its confidence intervals. This paper compares different methodologies for computing such intervals. Several methods, based on asymptotic normality, extreme value theory and subsample bootstrap, are used. Using Monte Carlo simulations, it is found that these approaches are only valid for high quantiles. In particular, there is a good performance for VaR(99%), in terms of coverage rates, and bad performance for VaR(95%) and VaR(90%). The results are confirmed by an empirical application for the stock market index returns of G7 countries.

This paper has as main objective to build a composite metric of financial soundness for the private corporate sector in Colombia. Instead of relying on the individual and sometimes restrictive financial ratio analysis approach, the purpose of this document is to provide a single metric aimed at measuring the financial health of firms. Said metric, the financial soundness index, is derived by employing the cross-section approach of principal component analysis. For the time period of 2000-2013, the results allow to identify which industries have a weak, strong or similar balance sheet performance relative to that observed for the private corporate sector as a whole. Furthermore for firms that are debtors of the Colombian financial system, validation tests on the index confirm the apparent relationship between accounting data and the credit risk perception of and materialization for financial intermediaries.JEL classification: L25, G30, G32, C3

Las opiniones contenidas en el presente documento son responsabilidad exclusiva de los autores y no comprometen al Banco de la República ni a su Junta Directiva.

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Monitorear el riesgo de crédito es fundamental para preservar la estabilidad del sistema financiero. Este informe presenta, para cada modalidad de cartera, un análisis de las condiciones de crédito y de los principales indicadores de riesgo.