This paper describes a simple yet powerful methodology to decompose asset returns sampled at high frequency into their base components (continuous, small jumps, large jumps), determine the relative magnitude of the components, and analyze the finer characteristics of these components such as the...

This paper develops mew robust inference procedures for analyzing the intraday return volatility patterns that constitute a focal point of much market microstructure theory. Our empirical analysis is motivated by the recent lifting of trading restrictions in the interbank foreign exchange (FX)...

Since Black, Jensen, and Scholes (1972) and Fama and MacBeth (1973), the two-pass cross-sectional regression (CSR) methodology has become the most popular approach for estimating and testing asset pricing models. Statistical inference with this method is typically conducted under the assumption...

Using nonparametric techniques, we develop a methodology for estimating conditional alphas and betas and long-run alphas and betas, which are the averages of conditional alphas and betas, respectively, across time. The tests can be performed for a single asset or jointly across portfolios. The...

Economists have long recognized that investors care differently about downside losses versus upside gains. Agents who place greater weight on downside risk demand additional compensation for holding stocks with high sensitivities to downside market movements. We show that the cross-section of...

We develop asset pricing models' implications for portfolio efficiency when there is conditioning information in the form of a set of lagged instruments. A model of expected returns identifies a portfolio that should be minimum variance efficient with respect to the conditioning information. Our...

Recently a market in options based on CPI inflation (inflation caps and floors) has emerged in the US. This paper uses quotes on these derivatives to construct probability densities for inflation. We study how these pdfs respond to news announcements, and find that the implied odds of deflation...

Realistic models for financial asset prices used in portfolio choice, option pricing or risk management include both a continuous Brownian and a jump components. This paper studies our ability to distinguish one from the other. I find that, surprisingly, it is possible to perfectly disentangle...

We analyze the impact of time series dependence in market microstructure noise on the properties of estimators of the integrated volatility of an asset price based on data sampled at frequencies high enough for that noise to be a dominant consideration. We show that combining two time scales for...

Classical statistics suggest that for inference purposes one should always use as much data as is available. We study how the presence of market microstructure noise in high-frequency financial data can change that result. We show that the optimal sampling frequency at which to estimate the...