In this paper, we consider American option contracts when the underlying asset has stochastic dividends and stochastic volatility. We provide a full discussion of the theoretical foundations of American option valuation and exercise boundaries. We show how they depend on the various sources of...

We apply several recently proposed tests for structural breaks in conditional variance and covariance dynamics. The tests apply to both the class of ARCH and SV type processes and allow for long memory features. We also apply them to data-driven volatility estimators using high-frequency data...