Assessing extreme values in political risk estimates

With the increasing integration of world markets, it is important to understand the impact of political risk on financial portfolios. Current research on the influence of political risk on portfolio returns has focused on the mean portfolio outcome, but has failed to address extreme outcomes. Existing literature on the topic has employed the International Country Risk Guide (ICRG) as measures of political risk to address diverse topics such as asset prices, market returns, and real-asset valuation. Findings include that portfolio diversification in politically risky countries is actually beneficial, political risk is an important factor in explaining market returns of equity, and that the impact of political risk factors is more pronounced in emerging as opposed to developed markets. We hypothesize that there exist different underlying variables of political risk causing extreme portfolio outcomes as opposed to mean portfolio outcomes.