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...

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...