Nonparametric estimation of market risk: an application to agricultural commodity futures

Purpose – While the extant literature is replete with theoretical and empirical studies of value at risk (VaR) methods, only a few papers have applied the concept of VaR to quantify market risk in the context of agricultural finance. Furthermore, papers that have done so have largely relied on parametric methods to recover estimates of the VaR. The purpose of this paper is to assess extreme market risk on investment in three actively traded agricultural commodity futures.