We investigate whether bonds span the volatility risk in the U.S. Treasury market, as predicted by most 'affine' term structure models. To this end, we construct powerful and model-free empirical measures of the quadratic yield variation for a cross-section of fixed-maturity zero-coupon bonds...

We develop a sequential procedure to test the adequacy of jump-diffusion models for return distributions. We rely on intraday data and nonparametric volatility measures, along with a new jump detection technique and appropriate conditional moment tests, for assessing the import of jumps and...

A rapidly growing literature has documented important improvements in financial return volatility measurement and forecasting via use of realized variation measures constructed from high-frequency returns coupled with simple modeling procedures. Building on recent theoretical results in...

Volatility has been one of the most active areas of research in empirical finance and time series econometrics during the past decade. This chapter provides a unified continuous-time, frictionless, no-arbitrage framework for systematically categorizing the various volatility concepts,...

Volatility permeates modern financial theories and decision making processes. As such, accurate measures and good forecasts of future volatility are critical for the implementation and evaluation of asset pricing theories. In response to this, a voluminous literature has emerged for modeling the...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that the long-run dependence in financial market volatility is best characterized by a slowly mean-reverting fractionally integrated process. At the same time, much shorter-lived volatility dependencies are typically observed with high-frequency intradaily...

We develop a new parametric estimation procedure for option panels observed with error which relies on asymptotic approximations assuming an ever increasing set of observed option prices in the moneyness- maturity (cross-sectional) dimension, but with a fixed time span. We develop consistent...