City Research Online

Abstract

This article develops a unifying framework for allocating the aggregate capital of a financial firm to its business units. The approach relies on an optimization argument, requiring that the weighted sum of measures for the deviations of the business unit's losses from their respective allocated capitals be minimized. The approach is fair insofar as it requires capital to be close to the risk that necessitates holding it. The approach is additionally very flexible in the sense that different forms of the objective function can reflect alternative definitions of corporate risk tolerance. Owing to this flexibility, the general framework reproduces several capital allocation methods that appear in the literature and allows for alternative interpretations and possible extensions.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is the accepted version of the following article: Dhaene, J., Tsanakas, A., Valdez, E. A. and Vanduffel, S. (2012), Optimal Capital Allocation Principles. Journal of Risk and Insurance, 79: 1–28, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1539-6975.2011.01408.x.
Publisher Keywords:	Capital allocation; risk measure; comonotonicity; Euler allocation; default option; optimisation.
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HF Commerce
Departments:	Bayes Business School > Actuarial Science & Insurance
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

Export

Downloads