A central proposition on which much of normative economics is founded asserts that if two or more adults voluntarily agree to an exchange or trade and this does not have a negative fall-out on others, then government should not stop this exchange. Yet, on a variety of matters (hazardous work,...

This paper examines the estimation of parameters of a discretely sampled Markov process whose continuous-time sample paths are generated by a continuous Brownian term and a stochastic jump term, a realistic setting for many financial asset prices. In discretely sampled data, every change in the...