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 provides an extensive analysis of the predictive ability of financial volatility measures for economic activity. We construct monthly measures of aggregated and industry-level stock volatility, and bond market volatility from daily returns. We model log financial volatility as...

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...

Constructed from high-frequency data, realized volatility (RV) provides an efficient estimate of the unobserved volatility of financial markets. This paper uses a Bayesian approach to investigate the evidence for structural breaks in reduced form time-series models of RV. We focus on the popular...

We propose a new discrete-time model of returns in which jumps capture persistence in the conditional variance and higher-order moments. Jump arrival is governed by a heterogeneous Poisson process. The intensity is directed by a latent stochastic autoregressive process, while the jump-size...

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...