Discussion of “How Banks' Value-at-Risk Disclosures Predict their Total and Priced Risk: Effects of Bank Technical Sophistication and Learning over Time”

Liu et al. (2004, this issue) show that technical sophistication and learning over time help improve the ability of bank trading portfolios' value-at-risk (VaR) disclosures to predict future trading income risk, and that trading VaRs predict bank-wide total risk and systematic risk. While the results suggest that VaRs are a reliable measure of risk for the sample firms, the study's incremental contribution is limited because of the nature of the sample firms and problems in variable measurement.