In the absence of market frictions, the cost-of-carry model of stock index futures pricing predicts that returns on the underlying stock index and the associated stock index futures contract will be perfectly contemporaneously correlated. Evidence suggests, however, that this prediction is...

Several previous studies have focused upon seasonal patterns in the unconditional volatility of intraday and daily returns data. But these investigations could be misleading without considering a fuller structural model of the time series properties of return volatility. The seasonal pattern in...