• The Korean Journal of Financial Management
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.165-188
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• 2009

This paper has suggested the methodology for the frontier portfolios and the optimal portfolio under the mean-VaR framework, not assuming the normal distribution and considering the investor's preferences for the higher moments of return distributions. It suggested the grid and rank approach which did not need an assumption about return distributions to find the frontier portfolios. And the optimal portfolio was selected using the utility function that considered the 3rd and the 4th moments. For the application of the methodology, weekly returns of the developed countries index, the emerging market index and the KOSPI index were used. After the frontier portfolios of the mean-variance framework and the mean-VaR framework were selected, the optimal portfolios of each framework were compared. This application compared not only the difference of the standard deviation but also the difference of the utility level and the certainty equivalent expressed by weekly expected returns. In order to verify statistical significances about the differences between the mean-VaR and the mean-variance, this paper presented the statistics which were obtained by the historical simulation method using the bootstrapping. The results showed that an investor under the mean-VaR framework had a tendency to select the optimal portfolio which has bigger standard deviation, comparing to an investor under the mean-variance framework. In addition, the more risk averse an investor is, the bigger utility level and certainty equivalent he achieves under the mean-VaR framework. However, the difference between the two frameworks were not significant in statistical as well as economic criterion.

• The Korean Journal of Financial Management
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.133-152
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• 2007

In this paper, we examine a portfolio selection model in which a safety-first investor maximizes expected return subject to a downside risk constraint. We use the Value-at-Risk as the downside risk measure. We exploit the fact that returns are fat-tailed, and use a semi-parametric method suggested by Jansen, Koedijk and de Vries(2000). We find a more realistic asset allocation than the one suggested by the literature based on the traditional mean-variance framework. For the robustness check, we provide empirical analyses using empirical quantiles. The results highlight that for optimal portfolio selection involving downside risks that are far in the tails of the distribution, our mean-VaR model with a fat-tailed distribution is superior.