Analysis on Asymmetric Tail Dependence of Portfolio Returns

We use the generalized Pareto distribution and the copula to analyze the impact of asymmetric tail dependence on the risk measures. Simulation results show that the risk measures with symmetric tail dependence underestimate those with asymmetric tail dependence. We also quantify the superiority in the portfolio returns from characterizing the asymmetric tail dependence. The returns of the optimal portfolios from the asymmetric marginals are higher than the returns of the optimal portfolios from the symmetric marginals in the majority of the cases. A caution needs to be exercised in concluding that characterizing the asymmetric dependence in the process of modeling the marginal distributions seems to have an impact on the performance of the optimal portfolio due to the statistical significance of the rate differentials.