# A Dual Characterisation of Regulatory Arbitrage for Coherent Risk Measures

#### Dr Martin Herdegen (University of Warwick)

Abstract:

We revisit portfolio selection in a one-period financial market under a coherent risk measure constraint, the most prominent example being Expected Shortfall (ES). Unlike in the case of classical mean-variance portfolio selection, it can happen that no efficient portfolios exist. We call this situation regulatory arbitrage. We then show that the absence of regulatory arbitrage is intimately linked to the interplay between the set of equivalent martingale measures (EMMs) for the discounted risky assets and the set of absolutely continuous measures in the dual characterisation of the risk measure. In the special case of ES, our result shows that the market does not admit regulatory arbitrage for ES at confidence level $\alpha$ if and only if there exists an EMM $Q \approx P$ such that $\Vert \frac{dQ}{dP} \Vert_\infty < \frac{1}{\alpha}$. The talk is based on joint work with my PhD student Nazem Khan.