We study the impact of FOMC announcements of Federal funds target rate decisions on individual stock prices at the intraday level. We find that the returns, volatilities and correlations of the S&P100 index constituents only respond to the surprise component in the announcement, as measured by...

This paper develops a two-step estimation methodology that allows us to apply catastrophe theory to stock market returns with time-varying volatility and to model stock market crashes. In the first step, we utilize high-frequency data to estimate daily realized volatility from returns. Then, we...

This paper introduces the Markov-Switching Multifractal Duration (MSMD) model by adapting the MSM stochastic volatility model of Calvet and Fisher (2004) to the duration setting. Although the MSMD process is exponential ß-mixing as we show in the paper, it is capable of generating highly...

In this paper we examine changes on investment decisions induced by the introduction of the Euro. There are two potential sources of portfolio reallocation. First, the introduction of the Euro diminished exchange rate risks within the EMU region, which relieved European investors from currency...

This paper provides high-dimensional and flexible importance sampling procedures for the likelihood evaluation of dynamic latent variable models involving finite or infinite mixtures leading to possibly heavy tailed and/or multi-modal target densities. Our approach is based upon the efficient...

The 2007-2008 global financial crisis and the subsequent anemic recovery have rekindled academic interest in quantifying the impact of uncertainty on macroeconomic dynamics based on the premise that uncertainty causes economic activity to slow down and contract. In this paper, we study the...

Discrete time volatility models typically employ a latent scale factor to represent volatility. High frequency data may be used to construct proxies for these scale factors. Examples are the intraday high-low range and the realized volatility. This paper develops a method for ranking and...