  This paper considers the specification of covariance structures with tail
estimates. We focus on two aspects: (i) the estimation of the VaR-CoVaR risk
matrix in the case of larger number of time series observations than assets in
a portfolio using quantile predictive regression models without assuming the
presence of nonstationary regressors and; (ii) the construction of a novel
variable selection algorithm, so-called, Feature Ordering by Centrality
Exclusion (FOCE), which is based on an assumption-lean regression framework,
has no tuning parameters and is proved to be consistent under general sparsity
assumptions. We illustrate the usefulness of our proposed methodology with
numerical studies of real and simulated datasets when modelling systemic risk
in a network.
