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Contemporary Challenges in Risk Management pp 163–202Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Subjective Beliefs and Statistical Forecasts of Financial Risks: The Chief Risk Officer Project

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Abstract

Information about financial risks comes from many sources. We formally consider how one can elicit and use information from two important sources when making forecasts. One source is a traditional statistical forecast, using familiar econometric methods for extrapolating from the past to the future. The other source is the elicited subjective belief distributions of “experts” in this domain: Chief Risk Officers of major international corporations. We demonstrate how these beliefs can be elicited in a formal, structured and incentivized manner, and critically contain information on the precision of the individual’s belief for each risk. We characterize the manner in which these two sources tell different stories about these risks, arguing that any distributional differences, or similarities, between the two sources are informative for risk managers. Finally, we characterize the degree of consistency among our experts: are they “on the same page” in their beliefs? We argue, again, that consistency or inconsistency of subjective beliefs is in itself informative for risk managers.1

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Authors
  1. Glenn W. Harrison
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  2. Richard D. Phillips
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

    Torben Juul Andersen

Copyright information

© 2014 Glenn W. Harrison and Richard D. Phillips

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Harrison, G.W., Phillips, R.D. (2014). Subjective Beliefs and Statistical Forecasts of Financial Risks: The Chief Risk Officer Project. In: Andersen, T.J. (eds) Contemporary Challenges in Risk Management. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137447623_8

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