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Under general multivariate regular variation conditions, the extreme Value-at-Risk of a portfolio can be expressed as an integral of a known kernel with respect to a generally unknown spectral measure supported on the unit simplex. The estimation of the spectral measure is challenging in practice and virtually impossible in high dimensions. This motivates the problem studied in this work, which is to find universal lower and upper bounds of the extreme Value-at-Risk under practically estimable constraints. That is, we study the infimum and supremum of the extreme Value-at-Risk functional, over the infinite dimensional space of all possible spectral measures that meet a finite set of constraints. We focus on extremal coefficient constraints, which are popular and easy to interpret in practice. Our contributions are twofold. First, we show that optimization problems over an infinite dimensional space of spectral measures are in fact dual problems to linear semi-infinite programs (LSIPs) – linear optimization problems in Euclidean space with an uncountable set of linear constraints. This allows us to prove that the optimal solutions are in fact attained by discrete spectral measures supported on finitely many atoms. Second, in the case of balanced portfolia, we establish further structural results for the lower bounds as well as closed form solutions for both the lower- and upper-bounds of extreme Value-at-Risk in the special case of a single extremal coefficient constraint. The solutions unveil important connections to the Tawn–Molchanov max-stable models. The results are illustrated with two applications: a real data example and closed-form formulae in a market plus sectors framework.

Max-stable processes provide canonical models for the dependence of multivariate extremes. Inference with such models has been challenging due to the lack of tractable likelihoods which has motivated use of composite likelihood methods Padoan et al. (J. Amer. Stat. Assoc. 105(489):263–277, 2010). In contrast, the finite dimensional cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) appear natural to work with, and are readily available or can be approximated well. Motivated by this fact, in this work we develop an M-estimation framework for max-stable models based on the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) of multivariate CDFs. We start by establishing conditions for the consistency and asymptotic normality of the CRPS-based estimators in a general context. We then implement them in the max-stable setting and provide readily computable expressions for their asymptotic covariance matrices. The resulting point and asymptotic confidence interval estimates are illustrated over popular simulated models. They enjoy accurate coverages and offer an alternative to composite likelihood based methods.