Market Risk of Developed and Emerging Countries During the Global Financial Crisis

This study compares the performance of the widely used risk measure, value at risk (VaR), across a large sample of developed and emerging countries. The performance of VaR is assessed using both the unconditional and conditional tests of Kupiec and Christoffersen, respectively, as well as the quadratic loss function. The results indicate that VaR performs much more poorly when measuring the risk of developed countries than of emerging ones. One possible reason might be the deeper initial impact of the global financial crisis on developed countries. The results also provide evidence of the decoupling of the market risk of emerging and developed countries during the global financial crisis.