hard · FRM Part 2 Operational Risk

A bank scales external operational-loss data to its own size before fitting severities. It uses a power-law scaling L_scaled = L_ext × (S_bank/S_ext)^β, where S is annual revenue and the estimated scaling exponent is hatβ=0.23. An analyst notes that the external consortium suffers a reporting threshold: only losses above $1 million are collected, and larger firms tend to have higher thresholds.

Which critique most precisely identifies the resulting bias in the fitted severity tail?

  1. Because larger firms report only above higher thresholds, naive pooling left-truncates big-firm data more severely, biasing the fitted scaling exponent and steepening (thinning) the inferred severity tail unless truncation is modeled in the likelihood.
  2. The threshold is irrelevant to severity tail estimation because it removes only small losses, which by definition have no influence on a high-quantile tail fit.
  3. Scaling by revenue with β<1 guarantees an unbiased tail because sublinear scaling automatically corrects any data-collection truncation across firm sizes.
  4. The bias inflates the tail: higher thresholds for big firms drop small losses and mechanically push the fitted tail index toward heavier tails, overstating capital.

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