This paper presents a comprehensive empirical evaluation of option-implied and returns-based forecasts of volatility, in which new developments related to the impact on measured volatility of market microstructure noise and random jumps are explicitly taken into account. The option-based...

Stochastic volatility and jumps are viewed as arising from Brownian subordination given here by an independent purely discontinuous process and we inquire into the relation between the realized variance or quadratic variation of the process and the time change. The class of models considered...

The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First we show how to estimate the volatility of high frequency log-returns where the estimates are not a affected by microstructure noise and the presence of Lévy-type jumps in prices. The second contribution focuses on the relationship between the...

Basel II and Solvency 2 both use the Value-at Risk (VaR) as the risk measure to compute the Capital Requirements. In practice, to calibrate the VaR, a normal approximation is often chosen for the unknown distribution of the yearly log returns of financial assets. This is usually justified by the...

We introduce Indirect Robust Generalized Method of Moments (IRGMM), a new simulation-based estimation methodology, to model short-term interest rate processes. The primary advantage of IRGMM relative to classical estimators of the continuous-time short-rate diffusion processes is that it...

In this paper we adapt the empirical similarity (ES) concept for the purpose of combining volatility forecasts originating from different models. Our ES approach is suitable for situations where a decision maker refrains from evaluating success probabilities of forecasting models but prefers to...

This paper presents some limit theorems for certain functionals of moving averages of semimartingales plus noise, which are observed at high frequency. Our method generalizes the pre-averaging approach (see [13],[11]) and provides consistent estimates for various characteristics of general...

We consider a new class of estimators for volatility functionals in the setting of frequently observed Itô diffusions which are disturbed by i.i.d. noise. These statistics extend the approach of pre-averaging as a general method for the estimation of the integrated volatility in the presence of...

For financial assets whose best quotes almost always change by jumping by the market`s price tick size (one cent, five cents, etc.), this paper proposes an estimator of Quadratic Variation which controls for microstructure effects. It measures the prevalence of alternations, where quotes jump...

We introduce a multivariate estimator of financial volatility that is based on the theory of Markov chains. The Markov chain framework takes advantage of the discreteness of high-frequency returns. We study the finite sample properties of the estimation in a simulation study and apply it to...