In finance, mainly for financial services firms, economic capital (ecap) is the amount of risk capital, assessed on a realistic basis, which a firm requires to cover the risks that it is running or collecting as a going concern, such as market risk, credit risk, legal risk, and operational risk. It is the amount of money that is needed to secure survival in a worst-case scenario. Firms and financial services regulators should then aim to hold risk capital of an amount equal at least to economic capital.
Typically, economic capital is calculated by determining the amount of capital that the firm needs to ensure that its realistic balance sheet stays solvent over a certain time period with a pre-specified probability. Therefore, economic capital is often calculated as value at risk. The balance sheet, in this case, would be prepared showing market value (rather than book value) of assets and liabilities.
The first accounts of economic capital date back to the ancient Phoenicians, who took rudimentary tallies of frequency and severity of illnesses among rural farmers to gain an intuition of expected losses in productivity. These calculations were advanced by correlations to climate change, political outbreaks, and birth rate change.
The concept of economic capital differs from regulatory capital in the sense that regulatory capital is the mandatory capital the regulators require to be maintained while economic capital is the best estimate of required capital that financial institutions use internally to manage their own risk and to allocate the cost of maintaining regulatory capital among different units within the organization.
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In social science, economic capital is distinguished in relation to other types of capital which may not necessarily reflect a monetary or exchange-value. These forms of capital include natural capital, cultural capital and social capital; the latter two represent a type of power or status that an individual can attain in a capitalist society via formal education or through social ties.
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Financial capital (also simply known as capital or equity in finance, accounting and economics) is any economic resource measured in terms of money used by entrepreneurs and businesses to buy what they need to make their products or to provide their services to the sector of the economy upon which their operation is based, e.g., retail, corporate, investment banking, etc. In other words, financial capital is internal retained earnings generated by the entity or funds provided by lenders (and investors) to businesses in order to purchase real capital equipment or services for producing new goods and/or services.
Value at risk (VaR) is a measure of the risk of loss of investment/Capital. It estimates how much a set of investments might lose (with a given probability), given normal market conditions, in a set time period such as a day. VaR is typically used by firms and regulators in the financial industry to gauge the amount of assets needed to cover possible losses. For a given portfolio, time horizon, and probability p, the p VaR can be defined informally as the maximum possible loss during that time after excluding all worse outcomes whose combined probability is at most p.
Operational risk is the risk of losses caused by flawed or failed processes, policies, systems or events that disrupt business operations. Employee errors, criminal activity such as fraud, and physical events are among the factors that can trigger operational risk. The process to manage operational risk is known as operational risk management.
The modeling of the probability of joint default or total number of defaults among the firms is one of the crucial problems to mitigate the credit risk since the default correlations significantly affect the portfolio loss distribution and hence play a sig ...
TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD2022
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This paper quantifies the collapse risk and earthquake-induced losses for a wide range of archetype buildings with special concentrically braced frames (SCBFs). The collapse risk and expected economic losses associated with repair, demolition and collapse ...
2018
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This paper quantifies the collapse risk and earthquake-induced losses for a wide range of archetype buildings with special concentrically braced frames (SCBFs). The collapse risk and expected economic losses associated with repair, demolition and collapse ...